Site Presented By
Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
If you're a Christian Coalition member looking for a movie that reinforces all the homespun values you hold dear, this Kate Hudson vehicle is for you!
May 26, 2004 | In "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942), James Cagney deciphers the Variety headline "Stix Nix Hix Pix" for a group of baffled teenagers. The cryptic rhyming phrase, he explains, means that small towns have rejected movies about country folk. Like everybody else, presumably, people in small towns went to the movies for the glamour of the big city.
I'd like to think that those people would have the good sense to reject "Raising Helen," too. It doesn't exactly abandon the big city; it merely shifts the action from Manhattan to Queens. But it makes a show of trading in the thrill of sophisticated urban life for a homiletic existence of conventional, homespun values -- all in the service of educating a young career woman that children and a man are the important things in life. Put it this way -- if a couple who belonged to the Christian Coalition, or your maiden aunt, or George and Laura Bush were looking for a reassuring night out, "Raising Helen" would fit the bill nicely.
Kate Hudson plays Helen, an executive assistant at a top-flight modeling agency whose older sister and brother-in-law are killed in a car accident, leaving her the guardian of their three kids, 15-year-old Audrey (Hayden Panettiere), 10-year-old Henry (Spencer Breslin) and 5-year-old Sarah (Abigail Breslin). It seems that perfectly spacing out her pregnancies wasn't the only way that big, dead sis was prepared. She had foreseen that Helen's carefree ways would need some grounding and that, in the event of her own tragic and sudden demise, her kids would be just the ticket.
Who could mourn a sister like that? Who wouldn't wish her alive again, if only to keep the meddlesome cow from interfering in your life? But we're not meant to see it as a bad thing that, without even consulting Helen, she took steps that threw her younger sister's life into a tizzy. No, we're meant to see it as an opportunity for personal growth.
"Raising Helen"
Directed by Garry Marshall
Starring Kate Hudson and John Corbett
The screenwriters, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, and the director, Garry Marhsall, are very shrewd about showing us the life Helen is leaving. Modeling, it seems, is the type of profession where attractive young women down Advil with champagne -- at 10 in the morning! Helen lives the sort of busy life that not only makes her late for family dinners but gives her the opportunity for casual sex. Clearly, this little missy needs a heapin' helpin' of adult responsibility.
How fortunate for her that we live in a society that makes it as difficult as it can for single mothers to pursue a career, or for many people to find affordable housing. Unable to shoehorn her three new charges into her tiny Manhattan apartment, Helen moves the brood to Astoria, Queens. Unable to balance her new mommy responsibility with her high-powered job, Helen gets the sack. Salvation comes figuratively in the form of a receptionist's job at a used-car dealership, and literally in the form of the hunky Lutheran minister (John Corbett, in another installment of his thankless career path as sexy guy who's a sport) who's principal at the kids' new school.
