Kate Hudson rom-coms are one of my truly guilty pleasures. Despite a number of them being paint-by-numbers examples of Hollywood schlock, I still find myself attracted to spending an hour and half in her company. She smiles, I smile. Simple as that!
“A Little Bit of Heaven” is emotionally manipulative, relentlessly inconsistent in tone and obscenely cheesy. So what? I still liked it enough to offer a mild recommendation to those who like Hudson and enjoy sappy movies whose sole job is to make chicks weep.
Kate stars as Marley, a gorgeous young ad-executive (aren’t all movie chicks gorgeous young ad-execs) who discovers that she has cancer. After a brief glimpse of a cloudy heaven and her Whoopi Goldberg vision of god, she is granted three wishes. She tells Goddess Whoopi that she wants to fly and to have a million bucks. She saves her third wish for later.
Despite Marley’s penchant for avoiding intimacy, she finds herself drawn to her sexy young doctor, Julian (Gael Garcia Bernal). Their relationship, based on awkward joke-telling and great sex, seems to bloom into something more than Marley is used to. Needless to say, she soon backs off so that the plot can navigate the oh-so-familiar “get together, break up, get back together” path.
The film is ludicrously sappy. It is an eye-rolling masterpiece in formulaic lameness. There are too many clichés to mention. There are secondary characters straight out of the rom-com handbook — quirky redhead, gay black neighbor, overbearing parents etc. However, with all of that holding it back, it still works on some instinctual level. The girl I went to see the movie with wept like baby. And, yes, even I may have welled up a little (although I told her that some popcorn salt got in my eye). I hardly ever give Kate Hudson flicks a bad rating… and that trend continues here despite my objective judgment.
