"Raising Helen"

I'm all for movies having their fantasy quotient (that's part of the reason we go to the movies). But if a movie chooses to introduce specifics, they have to make sense. Helen's rent in Queens is $1,200 a month. Her pay for a 40-hour workweek is $17.50 an hour. If she gets paid for her lunch breaks, that comes to $700 a week. Figuring deductions for taxes and insurance, that would leave about $500 per week. That leaves $800 a month for utilities and food, clothing, transportation, sundries and entertainment for four people. That's without any emergencies or savings plan and no school fees for three kids. And yet not once do Helen or any of the kids fret about money. Are Garry Marshall and the screenwriters that ignorant of the situation they've set up?

Maybe, though in other places they are obviously trying to have it two ways. Helen has another sister, Jenny (Joan Cusack, who brings her usual talent of caricature to a lousy role), a model mom who resents the fact that Helen has been given a job Jenny thinks herself much more suited for. The movie gets laughs out of her -- she's always giving potpourri for birthday gifts and trying to interest her husband in her knitting. She's the movie's Stepford Wife, the thing it can point to in order to say it's not trying to sell traditional roles for women. But the role it devises for Helen (even if she does rise above being a receptionist in the end) is just that conventional and cozy.

Hell, even the movie's idea of providing her with a man is proper -- he's a minister, for Christ's sake (and what exactly does one cry out when making love to someone who introduces himself as "Pastor Dan"?). The only moment I laughed at was one that's openly hostile to all the movie's nice intentions -- when Helen Mirren, as Hudson's boss at the modeling agency, is left in charge of the 5-year-old girl and regards her as disdainfully as if she were last season's Prada.

It would be nice to say that, at this point, conventional and cozy don't seem fitting for Kate Hudson. But they do. She's only been in movies for a few years, but already it's getting harder and harder to see the freshness that made her such a sexy ray of sunshine in "Almost Famous." She showed a flash of that in some scenes in "Le Divorce" (although it's hard for anyone to be good when working with the hapless Merchant-Ivory). But more and more, Hudson is becoming the queen of the forgettable mainstream comedy, the sort of picture you watch on cable when you have the flu or in the aftermath of a bad breakup -- something you hope will be distracting enough to keep you from throwing up or jumping out the window. It's not that she's bad here; it's that there's no way for anyone to be anything other than cuddly and dear in this role. But cuddly and dear seem to be what the filmmakers were going for; those are the virtues it upholds. There's no telling if the sticks will go for "Raising Helen," but this ode to the most stifling aspects of family and motherhood make you feel like the hicks have all uprooted themselves and moved into the front office at Touchstone.

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