Take 1: Garry Marshall’s Raising Helen is the story of a pretty woman down on her luck who meets a charming good-looking man and ends up getting out of life everything she ever dreamed of. Fade to black. The end.

Take 2: Helen (Kate Hudson) seems to have the perfect life. She neither lacks nor need anything. She is the favourite sister, the coolest aunt, the most valued employee. She knows how to get into all the hottest nightclubs and how not to wait for a table at the most fashionable restaurants. Then her sister Lindsey (Felicity Huffman) dies. Her life irreversibly changes, and not so much by what she looses as by what she gains: i.e. Audrey (Hayden Panettiere), Henry (Spencer Breslin) and Sarah (Abigail Breslin), her sister’s three kids. She has to move out of her hip singles apartment to a bigger apartment, she looses her job, looses her social life, and (worst of all for a woman) puts on weight. In attempting to rebuild her life she becomes aware of certain voids that have always existed, and of the significance of the relationships that she had always overlooked. Raising Helen oscillates, in what is by now a well-worn Hollywood fashion, between seriousness and fun, between the meaningful and the silly. A few words from Devo’s famous tacky rock-inflected quintessentially 80’s hit Whip It, which serves as a kind of thematic thread woven throughout the film, conveys some idea of this duality of moralizing and silliness: "when a problem comes along, you must whip it ... before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it ... when something’s going wrong, you must whip it ... whip it good..." Garry Marshall directed Overboard (1987), Beaches (1988), Pretty Woman (1990) and Runaway Bride (1999), and Raising Helen follows pretty much in the trajectory of these earlier films: it’s a light breezy exhalation from the Hollywood Dream Factory where meaning and humour are flipsides of the same shiny coin which won’t let us leave before it fulfills its promise of pleasure and gives us at least one bite-sized life-message.

Take 3: Raising Helen is slick and sassy just like its title which conceals an echo of the saying ‘Raising hell’. A truly interesting expression, ‘Raising hell’, with its connotations of literally lifting up hell from the depths in which it is concealed to the light of day in which we all live sounds truly portentous, but for all that it’s generally used in a light-hearted manner. Raising Helen might sound like it is about something, but don’t look too hard. If we want to understand the obvious emptiness, stupidity even, of many Hollywood narratives, we have to understand the significance of celebrity. If Hollywood narratives are clichéd and inhabited by characters without depth, it’s not because the scriptwriters are not adept at narrative construction or character development. Rather, it’s because the narrative and the characters that inhabit it are of secondary importance. They are constructed to be easy on the eye and easy on the mind -- even in dramatic or emotional moments -- and to slip by without becoming too forceful, too intense or too confronting. The primary interest in these films is the star(s), that shining glittering entity about which such a film orbits. In romantic comedies, (at least those out of Hollywood), the star that tends to shine brightest is the female lead. And just as a film like Pretty Woman not only pivots on Julia Roberts, but tends to become a showcase for her public persona, so too, Raising Helen projects Kate Hudson’s carefully-constructed made-in-Hollywood public persona into her onscreen character. This means if you like Kate Hudson you’ll like this film because you’ll get what you paid for: to see her, hear her, accompany her, laugh with her, cry with her, you’ll almost be able to touch her. Hollywood really does excel in blending reality together with fiction -- the Dream Factory is no shallow label. Celebrities, especially Hollywood actors and actresses, are the new gods and goddesses of the secular world in general, and the cinematic world in particular. They posses what everyone desires: perfect looks and mythical lives full of excitement. And they possess something else even more valuable -- they possess a halo, a mystical aura, an allure that comes from the simple fact that everyone else wants to be like them, to see them, to touch them, to spend their time together with them. Hollywood isn’t selling us its dreams via engaging narratives or nuanced characters, it’s selling us the allure of celebrity, the dream of being close to Him or Her for two hours or so. And they wants us to come away feeling good. These films almost say happiness guaranteed. That this happiness is not built to last for any significant time, or to take root to deeply, is also important -- when a factory’s into mass production they want you coming back for more. Hollywood’s goods are a strange amalgam of authenticity and illusion -- they sell us authentic illusions -- and the truth of it is we buy up big.

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