Raising Helen (2004)

A new theme is emerging in chick flicks. You could hear it, softly, at the end of ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' and it gets a few decibels louder in Garry Marshall's Raising Helen, a winsomely formulaic domestic comedy that says that women can have it all -- but they really shouldn't try to. Helen (Kate Hudson), an assistant at a New York modeling agency, loves the midnight party life. Then fate intervenes. One of her sisters is killed, and in the will the sister specifies that her three kids -- 15-year-old Audrey (Hayden Panettiere), 10-year-old Henry (Spencer Breslin), and 5-year-old Sarah (Abigail Breslin) -- should all be entrusted to Helen's care.

Holy responsibility! You'd think that ''Raising Helen,'' in the let's-pretend-I'm-not-a-glorified-sitcom-pilot tradition of ''Three Men and a Baby'' and ''Jersey Girl,'' would depict Helen's new life with a twinge of hardship. But the conflicts she faces all melt away like butter. After bidding goodbye to her chichi career, she moves her new family to a four-bedroom flat in Queens, lands a job as a secretary at a used-car lot, and commences a flirtation with a local pastor (John Corbett). Hudson's sunny, ringlet-tossing appeal fits snugly into the film's happy-homemaker ideology: She makes caring for three kids she barely knows look downright glamorous. ''Raising Helen'' does offer a lame, eleventh-hour gesture at nudging Helen toward a token version of her old career, but for women in the audience who are thinking of starting families, the film's real message is clear: Don't try this at work.

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