At the start of the movie, Kate Hudson’s Helen Harris admonishes the receptionist at Dominique’s modeling agency for bringing her daughter to work. “You know Dominique doesn’t like children.” Aha! Plot point! How… obvious. Even without knowing much about the film’s premise, you seem to know where the movie is headed.
Helen seems to breeze through life in this “feel-good” movie about a Manhattan party girl who suddenly inherits three children from her oldest sister, who dies with her husband in a car accident. It is a surprise both to Helen and their other sister Jenny (Joan Cusack), who is a model mother, down to the “mumsy haircut”. Helen tries to make do, moving to a different apartment, having to give up her social life, and eventually losing her job. Add to this the intricacies of raising three children: Audrey (Hayden Panettiere) wants to begin sexual exploration; Henry (Spencer Breslin), is morose and does not want to play basketball, once his favorite sport; and Sarah (Abigail Breslin) is added for the cutesy factor, as if Kate Hudson weren’t enough.
Joan Cusack doesn’t disappoint in her supporting role, Helen Mirren was quite a joy to watch, and John Corbett played his usual delectable man-next-door. Kate Hudson is playing a character not unlike almost every character she has played in the past; it’s like Penny Lane from Almost Famous just grew up. A little. There is also an Indian neighbor, Nilma Prasad, played by Sakina Jaffrey, who becomes Helen’s crisis control center. Nilma is the ideal neighbor, dropping everything at a moment’s notice to attend to Helen’s problems. Would that we were all lucky enough to have neighbors like her. The children, all veterans in their own right, are a delight to watch, especially Spencer (previously seen on The Kid), displaying a mixture of vulnerability, silliness and a degree of maturity so wonderful in children.
Aside from the overall lack of appeal or edge, there are a few major gripes about this pedestrian movie masquerading as a chick-flick, suffering from a fluffy plot and unimaginative screenplay. For one, parenting is serious business, and having three children suddenly thrust upon you when you are a work-worshipping, party-loving single woman—that would be cause for a nervous breakdown. But Helen seems to go about it jovially; in fact, even the fact that she loses her job doesn’t really faze her much—which can be credited to either bad writing, bad directing, bad acting, or all of that. On another note, that Helen makes a major decision about the children only after finalizing some arrangements with her job seems to cast a shadow of doubt on her decision: does she do it only because it is convenient?
In fact, this movie’s plot suffers from a total regard for convenience; and as such, the trials and difficulties are downplayed, so that there is no real tension regarding how things will end up. It was quite convenient that the pastor-principal of the children’s Lutheran school is a bachelor who falls for Helen; it was quite convenient that there was a next-door neighbor who would respond to Helen’s emergency calls at the last moment. Instead of being an empowering chick-flick, this movie (like a lot of director Garry Marshall’s movies) has settled on being saccharine, almost cloying. Still, there are quite a number of chuckle-moments, and the requisite scenes that tug at the heartstrings (and lachrymal glands) as well. These are not enough, however, to save this movie from a shadow of blandness and mediocrity.
