Entertaiment

Yours, Mine and Ours – A Pleasant Family Diversion
By Orson Scott Card

Editor’s note:  This movie review was reprinted with permission by the author from The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina.

Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball starred in the 1968 version of Yours, Mine, and Ours.  It was, believe it or not, based on a true story – Helen North and Frank Beardsley were real people.

But it was really just grist for the Hollywood high-concept comedy mill: The single mom with eight kids marries a single dad with twelve kids.  (Hi-jinks ensue.)

Remake time!  Now Dennis Quaid is in the Henry Fonda role, and Rene Russo is in the Lucille Ball role, and the kids have been scaled back.  Now the woman has ten kids and the man has “only” eight – but six of the woman’s kids were adopted.  (They took in foster kids and couldn’t let them go.)

The performances are delightful – every actor, kid and adult, does at least an adequate job, and some are quite charming.  Dennis Quaid is an actor who has always hovered just under first-rank stardom – it may be that he always had to make do with other actors’ leavings and never got the break-through role.  This isn’t it.

But his charm and talent sustain him through a movie that is so perfunctorily written that it seems like they shot the story notes rather than an actual script.  Admittedly, it’s hard to have eighteen kids on the screen and give them all their “moment,” but some subplots are so small they are almost laughable.

The oldest Beardsley boy’s run for school president, for instance, uses up all of sixty seconds of screen time, spread across three scenes.  In one scene, the “cool” Dylan North (Drake Bell) tells William Beardsley (Sean Faris, who stars in Reunion this season) how to fix his campaign poster.  Then we get a quick montage of the kids putting up posters throughout the school.  Then, in the midst of something else, a kid runs up and out of the blue says, “You won the election.”  Whoopee.

Later, when one of the kids asks William, “Aren’t you going to tell your dad you won the election?” I almost wanted to talk back to the screen: “Hey, when are you going to tell us?”

And how many times in the same movie can you have the kids trash the same house?  How many times do we need elaborate set-ups that result in actors getting covered with paint or slime or some other noxious substance?  Does somebody look seasick?  Then you know he’s going to puke, and somebody’s going to fall in the puke.  Does the man tell the woman a little story about a lighthouse keeper?  Then you know the movie will end with her lighting the light.  Tick?  Tock.  Every time.

This writing is worse than bad.  Bad writing is forgivable when it results from a simple lack of talent – you have to congratulate the writer for at least getting work when he has no discernable ability.  But this writing is worse because nobody seems even to have tried.

And anything that was good was probably cut out when they ruthlessly trimmed the script to bring the movie in under two hours.  Longer would have felt shorter because we might have gotten involved in something.

The same writing team also brought us the forgettable (and money-losing) Head Over Heels back in 2001, thus proving that if you ever got a movie made, you can get hired to write another, even if your first one stank.

Fortunately, the actors and the director made up for the shoddy script by giving performances that made me almost believe that real people might actually say and do the things the script made them say and do.  Sean Faris, Drake Bell, and Danielle Panabaker were the standouts among the kids, though the twins and the littlest ones made the most of some genuinely cute moments.

Look, you don’t go to a movie like this to see great art.  You’re happy if you pass a couple of hours pleasantly in the company of the people you brought with you.  The sailing shots sequences are great.  And they found a really cool old lighthouse to film it in.

We enjoyed it.  It was fun.