Raising Helen

Review By: Jennifer Krieger
JenniferKrieger@TheCinemaSource.com

Oh Kate Hudson, where have you gone? What sweet-talking agent has led you astray? You started out so promisingly, a loopy-sweet groupie in Cameron Crowe’s sap-fest Almost Famous but then what happened? Why the need to flail about, trying desperately to save misconceived romantic comedies like How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Le Divorce? You’re drowning in Hollywood muck my dear and Raising Helen is not the way out.

Maybe in theory this movie seemed like a good idea. Fast-track career woman with a hot nightlife and hotter body is suddenly thrown headlong into the world of motherhood when her sister dies. Throw in a cute man of the cloth and some solid supporting actors and bam, you’ve got a hit. Unfortunately the reality just doesn’t live up to the ideal. Death is never an easy topic to take on in a fluffy comedy, but Raising Helen demonstrates new lows in cinematic realism. After glittering Manhattinite Helen (Hudson) hears of her sister’s death over brunch at a swank restaurant the camera mercifully pans upward, away from her face so we don’t have to endure poor Kate trying to emote. The movie treats the tragic events that follow from a similar distance; they are rendered so breezily that we never take them seriously.

Helen expresses some real emotional pain over being forced to move to Queens and this could have been a fruitful sub-plot. But the movie is content to work completely with stereotypes, portraying the denizens of the borough as domino-playing old men and manic Indian couples. The children, all fine actors, seem to get over their parent’s sudden death in a matter of weeks, gamely supporting Helen as she embarks on the task of parenting the unruly bunch. While all demonstrate one or two text-book symptoms of ‘trauma’ any potentially serious moments are brief and quickly overshadowed by Hudson’s midriff or the bopping, insipid soundtrack. Similarly distracting is John Corbett as the hot-man-of-the-cloth, Pastor Dan. Shackled with lines like “I’m a sexy man of God and I know it” poor Corbett is doomed from the get-go. When he looks deep into Helen’s eyes, he projects a kind of desperation instead of passion. ‘Please,’ he seems to be saying, ‘get me out of this movie.’ And being that their chemistry is virtually nil, the poor girl gets none of it.

The DVD boasts special features, none of them truly special. Halfway amusing is the Director’s commentary only because it reveals that Garry Marshall thinks that he cast Hudson as an up-and-coming-model. The bloopers baisiclly display the cast’s ability to yell “scene”, although they do feature a dead-on impersonation of Marshell from Spenser Breslin; the kid’s got a future.

Finally, the film commits the major, unforgivable crime of miscasting and misusing Joan Cusack. Trapped under hideous muumuus, shackled with an ever expanding prosthetic tummy, the movie seems to take a kind of malicious glee in placing Cusack next to Hudson, as if to scream ...