Tweet

EMAIL

PRINT

Comments (0)

 1 of 3

Yours, Mine & Ours Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for some mild crude humor) Genre: Comedy, Family Theater release: November 18, 2005 by Paramount Pictures Directed by: Raja Gosnell Runtime: 1 hour 30 minutes Cast: Dennis Quaid (Frank Beardsley), Rene Russo (Helen North), Sean Faris (William Beardsley), Katija Pevec (Christina Beardsley), Danielle Panabaker (Phoebe North), Drake Bell (Dylan North), Lil' JJ (Jimi North), Rip Torn (Commandant Sherman), Linda Hunt (Mrs. Munion), Jerry O'Connell (Max) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Buy this poster

You wouldn't know it from watching this new version of the story, but there really was a widow with eight children named Helen North, and a widower with ten children named Frank Beardsley, and they really did marry each other. They even went on to have one more child together. Helen wrote a book about their experiences managing a family of 21, called Who Gets the Drumstick?, and it became a 1968 film called Yours, Mine and Ours, starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. That film is sometimes credited with inspiring The Brady Bunch, which premiered the following year; but this new version is more of a follower than a leader, since it was almost certainly produced to capitalize on the success a couple years ago of Cheaper by the Dozen, a large-family comedy which itself was a remake of a 1950 movie, and which will be back in the form of a sequel just four weeks from now.

So many large-family movies, so little time. Perhaps they should merge into one big super-duper-extended family. Or maybe the two franchises should have a showdown. We've had Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator. Maybe it's time for a Bakers vs. Beardsleys movie?

Anyway, the original Yours, Mine and Ours no doubt took its own movie-ish liberties with the facts. But it at least recognized that the story of Helen and Frank and their combined offspring was the story of a conservative family that stood out in a culture of increasing sexual liberalism. In fact, the first part of the 1968 edition is so riddled with innuendo, you might wonder if it deserves the tag "family film." Helen and Frank, both hitting the dating scene for the first time in decades, are distinctly uncomfortable with the voracious sexuality of the 1960s; but the film reaches its thematic climax when Helen goes into labor and Frank helps her down to the car, all while giving her oldest daughter a lesson in the meaning of love, sex and commitment. It's not going to bed with a man that proves you're in love with him, he tells her, it's getting up in the morning and facing the challenges that await you—starting, in this case, with the challenges of raising your own absurdly large family.

Alas, that moral sensibility—and the small, realistic touches that made the original film so endearing—are almost completely missing from the new Yours, Mine & Ours, which replaces the "and" with an ampersand, switches the numbers around so that Frank now has eight children and Helen has ten (six of which are adopted, Mia Farrow-style), and turns the entire story into a series of physically painful pratfalls and extremely unlikely plot twists.

One thing the new film does have going for it, though, is its two stars. Rene Russo and Dennis Quaid are more engaging and perhaps even more believable as parents, and as lovers, than Ball and Fonda were. So perfect are they for each other, in fact, that writers Ron Burch and David Kidd (Head over Heels) cheat a fair bit to get these lovebirds together as quickly as possible. In this version of the story, Frank and Helen are former high-school sweethearts who meet by chance in a restaurant, and then again on a boat at their 30th anniversary high-school reunion; so they already know each other. At their second meeting, they discover they have large families and dead spouses in common, and, despite knowing nothing else about the courses their lives have taken in the past three decades, they spontaneously get married, right then and there. So much for the courtship!

Needless to say, both sets of children are a little put out to discover that they have to move to a new home and blend with another family, all because their mom or dad happened to bump into someone that they, the children, have never met. To make matters worse, Frank is a Coast Guard admiral who has disciplined his children pretty well ("Permission to play, admiral?" asks one), whereas Helen is a progressive, artsy, group-hugging, share-your-feelings-in-the-family-circle type who lets her children (and her animals) do whatever they want. And apparently spanking is just one of the many, many issues that Frank and Helen neglected to discuss in those few hours they had together before they got married.

next page... |  1 of 3 | last page