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CHEAPER
BY THE DOZEN
6/10
USA
2003 : Shawn LEVY : 98 mins
Steve Martin’s
second blockbusting US-box-office comedy hit in less than a year is (thankfully)
several cuts above the dire Bringing
Down the House. In fact, despite a generally lousy critical
reception from American critics, Cheaper by the Dozen turns out
to be the latest in a series of well-made, surprisingly strong family-oriented
mainstream comedies – even if it doesn’t quite hit the heights of, say,
Freaky Friday or
School of Rock.
Dozen can’t
boast an all-stops-out barnstorming central performance of the type that
elevated those two movies to the next level. As the title indicates, this
is a very crowded affair indeed in which adults and kids alike compete
fiercely for the audience’s attention. Martin is on relatively restrained
form as Tom Baker, a small-town high-school football coach who’s raised
his twelve-strong brood alongside unflappable aspiring-writer wife Kate
(Bonnie Hunt). Problems only arise after Tom lands his lucrative dream-job
at a prestigious Chicago university, and the family must reluctantly relocate
to an opulent mansion in a ritzy suburb. When Kate goes off on a two-week
tour to promote her new book on child-rearing, overworked Dad is left
in charge… with predictably chaotic results.
As is par
for the course with Hollywood comedies about families, Cheaper by the
Dozen doesn’t stint on apple-pie morals and homilies: you can’t have
it all; money doesn’t buy happiness; careers shouldn’t be placed before
family responsibilities, etc. But director Levy and his screenwriters*
thankfully never let the ‘life-lessons’ element get in the way too much,
and Dozen often scores surprisingly big on the laughs front.
Raucous set-pieces
include the “grounded” Baker offspring sneaking into the birthday party
for mollycoddled neighbour Dylan (scene-stealing Steven Anthony Lawrence)
with typically disastrous consequences. Even better are the scenes where
the brood gleefully humiliate their eldest sister’s new boyfriend: a hilarious
(and unbilled) Ashton Kutcher - eerily convincing, and proving himself
an unexpectedly good sport, as Hank, an amusingly talentless, obnoxious
and self-obsessed “model-slash-actor”.
6th February,
2004
(seen 4th February : Odeon Gate, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
* Sam Harper,
Joel Cohen (not Coen!) and Alec Sokolow nominally adapted a novel-length
memoir by Frank Bunker Gilbreth Kr and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, which
was filmed (relatively faithfully) in 1950 with Clifton Webb and Myrna
Loy.
by Neil
Young
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