Starring Kate Hudson, Joan Cusack, and John Corbett. Rated PG.

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The death of a child's turtle is more devastating than the demise of a young woman's career. That, in a nutshell, is the moral of Raising Helen. The maturing of the film's main character as she grapples with the realization, upon instant parenthood, that only selfless motherhood will elevate her into the ranks of truly worthy women is the picture's aim. Unfortunately, the maternal set in director Garry Marshall's cinematic suck-up to child bearers is exemplified not by June Cleavers but by condescending, housebound drill sergeants from the "Touch my cub and I'll tear you a new one" school of maternity. The ladies also boast bad haircuts and noninvolved husbands who whinny at their unmarried sisters-in-law. This film may strive to illustrate that it is a happy family, not a bubble-wrapped male model, that is the key to a girl's happiness, but Helen might actually be the most effective marriage deterrent and birth control on the market.

The ever-airy Kate Hudson plays Helen, a delightful model-agency "fixer" who, when her sister and brother-in-law die in a car accident, is made sole guardian of their three children. This ticks off her more parentally experienced sister (Joan Cusack, more chilling than she was in Arlington Road, as a homemaker who berates even her fetus), and the post-feminist struggle between smug breeder and selfish bachelorette career woman is on. And whose side audiences take will largely depend upon which tired female stereotype offends them the least.

A true fish-out-of-water romp, Raising Helen recalls Diane Keaton's savvy executive but hapless mommy in 1987's Baby Boom. However, Helen's tizzy, although similarly caused by the inheritance of an instant family, revolves mostly around our heroine's efforts to earn a gold seal of approval from "real" mothers. Because we don't like them, however, and also because of a fearless, wide-ranging performance by the winsome Hudson, it's painful to watch our heroine figuratively crawling on her belly to her tormentors. Ergo, it's not funny. Worse, when the film does soften, not even the combined oomph of Cusack and Helen Mirren (looking like an albino Cleopatra as Helen's boss), who contribute impeccable comic timing, can repel the cloying sentimentality of an oft-repeated cutesy poem recited as a shoe-tying lesson for a youngster.

But sap is what Marshall is about. For years, in films like Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride and waaaay back to TV's Laverne and Shirley, Marshall has enthusiastically shilled, with the dreamy irrationality of a bride-in-waiting, the "all you need is love and marriage" prescription for single women. And now he's upped the commitment factor to include kids. Romantic as it may sound, the message still has an unpleasantly old-fashioned taste,
especially given that Helen's single-mother status is played, albeit very subtly, as unacceptable. Hence, the arrival of "the prince"--so as to create a socially acceptable family uniting young Helen with an admonishing Lutheran pastor almost old enough to be her father--feels icky, even if he is John Corbett, Aiden from Sex and the City. Or maybe because he is.