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| Julianne Moore and Hugh Grant in Nine Months |
Cast: Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, Robin Williams, Mia Cottet. Screenplay: Chris Columbus, based on a screenplay by Patrick Braoudé. Cinematography: Donald McAlpine. Production design: Donald McAlpine. Film editing: Raja Gosnell, Stephen E. Rivkin. Music: Hans Zimmer.
Chris Columbus's Nine Months is a sometimes painfully unfunny attempt to blend slapstick with romantic comedy, centered on the notion that women in their 30s should get married and have children. So when Rebecca Taylor (Julianne Moore) discovers that her birth control has failed and she's pregnant, she and Sam Faulkner (Hugh Grant), who are living together, face the big decision. She's for it, and he's -- well, he's played by Grant at his most dithery. The rest of the film wobbles between treating the pregnancy as a real-life couple might and treating it as an excuse for knockabout scenes. In one of the latter, for example, Sam and his new friend Marty (Tom Arnold), get into a fight in a toy store with a man in a dinosaur suit (based on a then-popular kid's show about a purple dinosaur called Barrney). The movie climaxes in a fight in the delivery room that's supposed to be funny but is more than a little disturbing thanks to the presence of Robin Williams as a Russian obstetrician who has unaccountably been allowed to practice in America and spouts a lot of probably ad-libbed gynecological malapropisms. But even when the film takes Rebecca's pregnancy seriously, it's just tedious. Grant did his career no good by mugging his way through the film, and skilled players like Moore, Jeff Goldblum, and Joan Cusack are wasted.
