NINE MONTHS
A film review by Joan Ellis
Copyright 1995 Nebbadoon Syndicate
NINE MONTHS is certainly the longest pregnancy I have ever experienced. It is a very silly movie. Whether it is also funny will depend on you.
Pregnant Becca (Julianne Moore) is stranded in the current stereotype of the young woman who lives with a man she loves in an arrangement that includes hard work and fun, but not marriage or, God forbid, children. Why would the "he" of this movie want responsibility or commitment when the woman of his dreams is already in his bed, and a red Porsche and San Francisco Bay are immediately outside the window of his perfect apartment?
When Becca decides her clock is ticking, she has a tough conversion on her hands in the person of her lover, Samuel, who is played--dare I say the words--by Hugh Grant. For one hour and forty-two minutes we watch Hugh pout, growl, and overact. It would be nice to think he is trying to lift the movie upward, but it is remotely possible that he thinks the audience just can't get enough of him. So overdone is his mugging that the pregnant woman becomes the movie's brightest spot. Actress Julianne Moore is a very appealing actress and has all the right reactions to the ludicrous chaos that surrounds her.
On their first visit to the delivering O.B., Becca and Samuel run smack into Dr. Kosevich (Robin Williams), a newly arrived Russian veterinarian who has recently decided to switch his specialty to babies. Williams causes a lot of spontaneous laughter with his malapropisms. He calls for "Anastasia" to anesthetize and discusses Becca's "Volvo" with gentle discretion.
Williams is very funny here, but he carries the rest of the cast straight into the familiar spectacle of Americans falling from farce to slapstick whenever they try a British specialty. The whole silly thing dissolves finally into a hospital scene full of enough fuzzy love to please Newt and the whole of America's heartland. This might have been a romantic comedy or a zany farce, but no one made the choice, so we have a little of everything and a whole lot of nothing.
And then there's the "incident." Although there can't be many Americans who would be shocked by a celebrity indulging in one-stop shopping, it may not be what people most want from the charming, awkward bumbler they had come to love in FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. The box office will tell whether the laughter that rocks the theater at the sight of his face is derisive or affectionate. It hardly matters; the movie is still a bust.
Let's not blame the whole thing on Hugh Grant. Writer/director Chris Columbus has the distinction of creating three of the most intolerable movies ever made: MRS. DOUBTFIRE and those violent assaults on sensibility, the HOME ALONEs. NINE MONTHS is not as excruciatingly bad as the others. Let's assume Columbus is in a lull.
Film Critic : JOAN ELLIS Word Count : 489 Studio : 20th Century Fox Rating : PG-13 Running Time: 1h42m
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews