A Little Bit of Heaven (12A) 108 mins **
You can just about see what attracted Nicole Kassell, director of 2004’s acclaimed paedophile drama The Woodsman, to this peculiar carcinogenic romance. It does something unusual in putting centre stage an independent heroine – Kate Hudson’s advertising whizz Marley – who displays no particular interest in settling down. The problem’s that she should be rewarded for her pleasure-seeking lifestyle with advanced-stage bowel cancer, which seems a bum deal, to say the least.
The kicker (or is it consolation?) is that only when Marley goes in for a colonoscopy does she meet her ideal man: Gael Garcia Bernal as the movies’ least likely Dr. Goldstein. That the remainder casts Whoopi Goldberg as God gives some indication of the goofiness that proves diverting in the short term, then confounding: Kassell and stand-up turned screenwriter Gren Wells try to jolly matters along between bouts of chemo and soul-searching with urinating primates, fun-sized male escorts and Bernal’s extensive yo-yo collection.
No-one’s quite decided how serious Marley’s (or the film’s) prognosis really is – Hudson has that strain of cancer, exclusive to the movies, that leaves her looking drained only one scene out of two – although there’s a chick-flick first in the mid-film shopping montage paid for out of the heroine’s life insurance. Kassell finds atmospheric New Orleans locations, and a decent cast strain to make the bizarre premise work, but like the proctologists it calls in to play Cupid, it’s caught between any number of stools.
A Little Bit of Heaven opens nationwide tomorrow.
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