Review: Raising Helen

The film exists in a fantasy New York City no one has ever seen before.

Raising Helen
Photo: Touchstone Pictures

Garry Marshall’s preachy Raising Helen isn’t being billed as a fairy tale, but it exists in a fantasy New York City no one has ever seen before. Helen Harris (Kate Hudson) works for the nicest “bitch” in the world (Helen Mirren) at a top Manhattan modeling agency that employs mothers and water cooler delivery men, goes to modeling shows where the women can’t strut and the men all have at least 10% body fat, and goes to dorky clubs with inexplicably impossible door policies. When Helen’s Devo-loving sister dies somewhere in the film’s painless off-screen space, she’s left with three kids to raise: 15-year-old bourgeoning hoochie Audrey (Hayden Panettiere), ten-year-old wisecracker Henry (Spencer Breslin), and five-year-old cutie Sarah (Abigail Breslin). After one too many screw-ups, Helen loses her cushy executive assistant position and has to take a job at a used car lot as a secretary making more money ($17.50 an hour) than anyone else living in Queens, where she now lives among the equally underprivileged. While Jack Amiel and Michael Begler’s screenplay for Martha Coolidge’s The Prince & Me was critical of the misogynistic fairy tales promised to young girls, their Raising Helen script is largely contemptuous of single young women, particularly those of the Sex and the City variety. Instead of taking dead aim at the modeling industry, this innocuous, egregiously wholesome defense of family targets Carrie Bradshaw, err, Helen instead. This party girl doesn’t know it yet, but birthin’ babies and finding a good man (preferably a priest: Sex and the City’s John Corbett) is infinitely more fulfilling and acceptable than popping bubble wrap with a hot male model after a night on the town.

Score: 
 Cast: Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Helen Mirren, Hayden Panettiere, Amber Valletta, Felicity Huffman, Hector Elizando  Director: Garry Marshall  Screenwriter: Jack Amiel, Michael Begler  Distributor: Touchstone Pictures  Running Time: 119 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2004  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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