A few charming performances salvage Raising Helen, which lowers itself with too many punchlines and not enough plot.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 27, 2004
[Photo: Touchstone Pictures]
In Raising Helen, Kate Hudson’s character Helen falls for the Rev. Dan Parker (John Corbett), the principal of the Lutheran school where she has enrolled her two nieces and nephew.
View a clip
By now, everyone knows what to expect from a Garry Marshall movie; a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants and, of course, the comic stylings of Hector Elizondo, apparently the filmmaker's good-luck charm after 13 joint projects and another coming later this summer.
One thing that can't be denied about Marshall is his loyalty, to people such as Elizondo, and to old-fashioned film virtues that seem corny these days. Marshall, 69, still wears his Borscht Belt with pride, making jokes that are too familiar and drama that merely sets up punch lines and hanky wringing. Complaining about it is akin to insulting Grandma's rhubarb pie. It's easier to smile pleasantly and spit when nobody's watching.
Raising Helen made me smile a few times but so inconsistently that I mostly wanted to rinse that artificially sweet taste off my cinema palate. The best anyone can say is that it's a nice movie, certainly nicer than its themes would play in a movie by almost any other filmmaker. For some moviegoers that will be enough. It almost was for me.
Kate Hudson kept me on the fence with a charming performance as Helen Harris, a fashion magazine editor whose Manhattan nightclub style is cramped when her sister and brother-in-law die in an auto accident. Helen, who has never displayed maternal instincts, gets custody of their three children. The other sister Jenny (Joan Cusack) is the motherly type, creating conflict that, as one might guess, remains nicer than it would be in real life.
So, we essentially have a remake of a movie that flopped last year (Uptown Girls) starring an actor imitating her mother, Goldie Hawn, coping with abrupt parenthood in Overboard, also directed by Marshall. The comparison is uncanny and unavoidable. Hudson twinkles just like her mom, and Marshall reportedly called her "Goldie" throughout the production. One minor pleasure of Raising Helen is noticing the resemblance.
We also get another casually romantic performance by John Corbett (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) as the Rev. Dan Parker, principal of the Lutheran school where Helen enrolls the children. His scenes with Hudson have a quiet crackle suggesting they could be a formidable team with a better script.
If Marshall focused entirely upon Helen and Dan's relationship, this would be a more satisfying film. Her misunderstandings of his religious restrictions are funny and his declaration of being a "sexy man of God" is uniquely romantic. These are two people who truly have to discover each other. They don't bicker for 90 minutes then fall into each other's arms. The problem is that Marshall continually interrupts their evolution into a couple with second, third and fourth bananas.
Each child must have a problem for Helen to resolve. Teenaged Audrey (Hayden Panettiere) is dating a delinquent; pudgy Henry (Spencer Breslin) has only a pet turtle for friendship; and little Sarah (Abigail Breslin) won't accept a maternal substitute. Jenny keeps clucking about Helen's unfitness for the task. Elizondo pops in and out as a used-car salesman learning lessons through Helen's personal growth. Helen Mirren makes the obligatory at-work complications tolerable as the magazine's publisher.
Giving everyone something to do pads the movie, an offense Marshall further commits with musical interludes such as a family Devo jam, and montages of Helen's highs and lows. When the reason Helen is chosen for motherhood is revealed it's so gooey and banal that the tears Marshall expects could turn out to be exasperated sighs. Hudson and Corbett make it all better but not much.
Raising Helen
Grade: C-plus
Director: Garry Marshall
Cast: Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere, Spencer Breslin, Abigail Breslin, Hector Elizondo, Helen Mirren, Sakina Jaffrey
