Raising Helen English Movie
"Raising Helen" has its heart in the right place. Director Gary Marshall's films can never be accused of not having a heart. If anything, "Pretty Woman", "Runaway Bride" and "Beaches" had so much heart, they threatened to turn the plot luminously lachrymose.
In "Raising Helen", Marshall curbs his tendency to turn tearful. His trademark sentimental treatment of suburban themes is converted into a kind of hopeful humour that looks at grim themes like death and god with a winking wackiness.
I am afraid in spite of an attractive cast and some terrific situations in the plot, Marshall is unable to achieve the crossover from tears to chuckles. "Raising Helen" refuses to rise above the level of a passable romantic comedy.
Everything is too neat, too pat and too bland to evoke anything beyond an amused curiosity in the audience. From the outset when Marshall shows his heroine Helen (Kate Hudson) as a happy-family-oriented, career-driven damsel on the run we know something will go terribly wrong.
And it does. Helen's eldest sister dies leaving behind three cautious and guarded children. The deaths are kept out of the narrative. That's the only way to beat tragedy in a romantic comedy. You overlook it.
The manner in which the tragedy is trivialised to fit the romantic comedy mould is far from amusing.
What's worse, the expectant drama of a fiercely career-minded, single woman's struggle to adopt three children and be a good mom to them is rendered emaciated by the protagonist's acquiescence before destiny's cruel blows.
As played by Kate, Helen silently submits to the dramatic change in her life, gives up her cushy job in a modelling agency (some interesting catty catwalk conversation here), happily hunts for a downtown apartment, moves into it with her sister's kids, looks for a new job and finds it with a benevolent used-cars seller (played by Gary Marshall's lucky mascot Hector Elizondo, who has been in every single film by the director).
So where-oh-where is the dramatic tension in all the flurry of motherly activity that overtakes the working girl's life? Most of the episodes devised to accentuate Helen's upturned life are so banal they make you blush by their blandness.
There's a sequence when her new adopted little girl walks right on to the ramp walkers and even trips one model over...much to the horror of Helen's boss (played by that wonderful actress Helen Mirrem), the archetypal woman in a tuxedo.
Such moments fill the screen with the scent of a harmless though annoying aura. Some of the characters, for instance Helen's new landlady (who has just one sequence where she says, "I'm available only from 8.30 to 9 in the mornings. I've a life") make the goings-on interesting.
Helen's Indian neighbour, played by Sakina Jaffrey who rushes in with samosas and a baseball bat to rescue the flurried new mom, is a spunky homage to ethnicity in this rendition of the American Dream.
The real lifesaver of the otherwise-loose-limbed plot is the always-watchable Joan Cusack. Playing Helen's over-punctilious, over-bearing and overworked elder sister, Cusack again creates a resonance beyond the script for her character. She's delightfully goofy and correct.
An odd combination of prissy righteousness and spaced-out craziness Cusack steals every scene from Kate Hudson who's got the can't-go-wrong author-backed role.
John Corbett as the pastor who wants to date Helen is also funny, though over-cute. The moments when he tries to prove priests can be sexy are a measure of the film's limited mirth worth.
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