D+

Would somebody please stop Garry Marshall before he directs again? True, he’s had a few successes on the big screen, and his television version of “The Odd Couple” was appreciably superior to the film that Gene Saks made of the original play. But his recent efforts have been mostly excruciating, and the trite, manipulative “Raising Helen” joins such dismal dogs as “The Other Sister,” “Exit to Eden” and “Dear God” as a well-deserved addition to the Marshall Hall of Shame.

The picture makes the same mistake so many of the director’s efforts have, of trying to mix rank sentimentality and broad comedy in what becomes an unholy brew. Like a bad sitcom, it wants to make you smile while tugging at your heartstrings, but what it induces is a grimace and heartburn. The very premise has a network or cable TV feel (indeed, a WB series called “Summerland,” based on very much the same idea, is due to debut on June 1, only three days after this movie opens): Helen (Kate Hudson) is a hard-driving career woman at the Manhattan modeling agency presided over by demanding prima donna Dominique (Helen Mirren). When her suburban sister Lindsay (Felicity Huffman) and her husband (Sean O’Bryan) are killed in an auto accident, the ambitious free spirit learns to her surprise that they have named her guardian to their three children, 15-year old Audrey (Hayden Panettiere), 10-year old Henry (Spencer Breslin) and 5-year old Sarah (Abigail Breslin). (The perfect spread in ages certainly suggests some careful family planning–or maybe a scriptwriter’s crutch.) The arrangement distresses Helen and Lindsay’s other sister Jenny (Joan Cusack), a fanatical hausfrau who considers herself the perfect wife and mother and the logical choice to take in her nieces and nephew. Helen decides to assume the responsibility, though, leading to the same sort of difficulties that single dad Ben Affleck recently faced juggling work and parenting in “Jersey Girl,” though here the problems are tripled. (Audrey’s rebellious, Henry misses his dad and Sarah feels abandoned.) Also straight out of the screenwriter’s manual is an obligatory romantic subplot, remotely unusual only in that it centers on an easygoing Lutheran minister, Dan Parker (John Corbett), in whose school Helen enrolls the children. As you would expect, there’s plenty of saccharine turmoil and soul-searching, but everything turns out okay–surprise, surprise. Cue the violins, courtesy of John Debney.

If one didn’t know better, you might swear that “Raising Helen” is nothing more than an elongated pilot for a CBS Monday night series that’s wandered by mistake onto the big screen. But Marshall and Disney’s Touchstone unit apparently believe that, in the era of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” there’s an audience out there for this kind of mawkish drivel in theatres. Perhaps they’ll be proven right, but it’s very doubtful. Even on its own undemanding terms, the script by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler (whose only previous effort was the flop “The Prince & Me”) wallows in bathos and lame family-friendly humor, and Marshall’s direction is relentlessly heavy-handed, making the poor material seem all the worse. Following the terrible “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” Hudson takes yet another step down the career ladder; her combination of giddiness and intensity here is singularly unappealing–she really needs a new script-reader to suggest more suitable projects. Corbett displays the same laid-back charm he showed in “Greek Wedding,” but his character is just a writer’s convention. Jenny, on the other hand, is a weird combination of strong mother figure and object of ridicule, and the talented Cusack never manages to get a secure hold on her; Mirren gets to snarl and sneer and wear nice clothes, but her thespian talents go completely unused. Hector Elizondo continues his string of supporting roles in Marshall movies, playing a good-natured used car dealer with whom Helen gets a job after leaving Dominique’s staff. His role is oddly appropriate, given that the picture seems like used goods itself, but the actor proves no more effective a good luck charm than he has in the director’s earlier efforts. The youngsters are a pretty pallid lot, and visually the picture is at best ordinary.

It may also be noted that while it’s a nice change for a movie that involves a man of the cloth to make him a Lutheran pastor, it would be ever nicer if the scripters put a bit of effort into getting things right about him. No Lutheran minister would ever genially acknowledge that his view of the afterlife includes a belief in purgatory, for instance; Martin would spin in his grave. In Marshall’s last movie, “The Princess Bride,” there was a similar blunder involving a Latin phrase (we can only hope it will be corrected in the upcoming sequel). Ordinarily one might be willing to overlook such apparently minor blemishes, but in the case of this director’s movies, they seem to point to a general sloppiness that infects the entire project. These flaws may be small, but the movies themselves are major missteps.

Julieta Cardinali, a radiant young Argentinean actress, visited Dallas recently to promote her new film, Alejandro Agresti’s “Valentin,” which is being released in this country by Miramax. The period comedy-drama, which has autobiographical overtones, centers on a young boy (Rodrigo Noya) who attempts to play matchmaker for his divorced father (Agresti); Cardinali plays Leticia, whom Valentin tries to persuade to become his new mother, with unexpected results.

When asked whether she was like Leticia, Cardinali said, “For Leticia, everything is inside. When the boy speaks to her, she listens but she doesn’t talk too much. That’s not my case. I talk a lot, and I speak out what I think. I think Leticia is a more reserved person. She’s sweet, though. Me, too. I’m joking.”

There were some similarities, Cardinali noted, between the time in which the story is set and the circumstances in which it was filmed. “The film is set in ’69, and at that time we had a repressive military government,” she said. One sequence in the picture, in which a priest’s sermon against the regime causes his frightened parishioners to abandon their pews, points to the atmosphere of the time. Argentina has been a functioning democracy for decades, but as Cardinali recalled, a different kind of turmoil forced a hiatus in the film’s shooting schedule. “We started in December two years ago,” she explained, “and we shot for three weeks. Then we had to stop because our president resigned and the country was in a mess. It was impossible to shoot. The banks were closed, so we couldn’t get the money out of the bank to shoot the film. Really, it was a disaster. We had to stop for two months to wait for the country to calm down. Then we started again and shot for three more weeks. So it was six weeks [in all]. It was a very difficult time for us in Argentina.” Happily, she said, the problems this time around were purely economic, and were democratically resolved. “The country is very hopeful with a new president,” she said. And she noted that government support for the entertainment industry has helped bring about a vibrant industry in film and television.

Cardinali spoke glowingly of little Noya, her then seven-year-old co-star on whom the success of the film largely depended, calling him “a totally natural actor…I thought, well he has a huge responsibility with the film because he is the film, he’s the narrator of the film. I thought maybe he’d get nervous and forget the lines. But nothing of that [kind] happened. He was fantastic. He was having so much fun with the film while he was doing the film. He was enjoying [it]–he was playing. It was great with him, because he was so natural that it made it easier for us.”

Newcomer Noya, Cardibali recalled, was selected for the role through an audition. “He goes to the casting, and there were these little boys–like blond, pretty,” she said, laughing. “He’s cross-eyed–he’s like that, he has that eye problem, and he was [wearing] his glasses. And he was the last one in the audition, and when he ended the audition, it was Agresti in the audition, and he told him, ‘If you are not too expensive, you are the one.’” The boy has since caught the acting bug. Cardinali has done another film with him, also directed by Agresti, following “Valentin.” “He said that he only wanted to do movies,” she recalled with a smile. “He [said], ‘I want to do movies because I love cinema.’”

Cardinali also began her career at a very young age. “When I was nine or ten, I studied ballet and I wanted to be a ballerina,” she said. “It didn’t work. And then when I was thirteen, I started on a TV show for kids, dancing. It was a very popular show. Then I started drama and had my first TV program,” about school life. She went on to do more television before teaming with Agresti to make her film debut in “A Night With Sabrina Love,” about a teen who wins a date with a famous porn star in a contest. “Agresti lived in Holland for, like, sixteen years. But the producer of that first film, he knew me because of my work, and he called me and talked to me. I read the script and said, ‘Yes, fantastic–I want to do it.’ And then I met Agresti and started shooting the film. I’ve done three with him [now].” But she works regularly with other filmmakers as well, mostly in dramas “because,” as she joked, “I’m a drama queen. But I like comedy, too.”

Agresti’s “Valentin” is a bit of both.