Three Men and a Little Lady
Drab Comedy | 105 Minutes | 1990 | United States
(1.5/4)
Director: Emile Ardolino | Producers: Ted Field, Robert W. Cort | Screenplay: Charlie Peters | Starring: Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, Ted Danson, Nancy Travis, Robin Weisman | Music: James Newton Howard | Cinematography: Adam Greenberg
Three Men and a Baby is more than a guilty pleasure, it’s one of the defining movies of the 1980s for the easy chemistry between its three leads, and for the panoply of fashion, interior design, and architectural styles it affords, an unconstrained movement of plaids and pastels under the neon lights and glass hallways of their luxe apartment and out in the bustling parks and streets of New York. With a different group of people behind the camera – Emile Ardolino replacing Leonard Nimoy in the director’s chair, from a screenplay by Charlie Peters – Three Men and a Little Lady understands none of the above.
Mary, the titular baby from the first picture, is now five years old, and the understanding reached by her various caregivers at the end of that film has managed to prevail. Jack, her biological father, an actor who somehow pays his way via the occasional commercial or B-movie role, Peter and Michael, an architect and cartoonist and her two honorary fathers, and Sylvia her newly successful theatre actress mother all live together in unorthodox bliss. They love Mary equally and their intermittent careers and social lives allow them enough time to variously provide Mary with all she could need. But at the first signs of trouble – a few raised eyebrows at a school committee meeting, an untoward comment by one of Mary’s classmates, and Sylvia’s decision that she not only must get married, but now and to the first person who pops the question – things swiftly fall apart.
And not only for their domestic situation, but for the movie itself. The opening of the film is a montage (set to a Madonna-lite song by Donna De Lory, Madonna’s onetime backup singer whose boyfriend wrote the hit ‘Open Your Heart’), which takes us through Mary’s infancy: the foursome plus one have moved, but they still live in Manhattan, in a handsome apartment. Their kitchen is bigger still, Lego now complements the interior’s bold colour palette, there are more glass-block partitions and walls adorned with hand-painted murals, everything is vital and light. The first real indication that something is off comes when the men perform a bedtime rap for the amusement of Mary. In Three Men and a Baby, they collaborated instead on ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight’, an old doo-wop song that had stood the test of time and suited the men’s natural timbres. The rap they perform here is trite and stereotypical, admonishing Mary against ‘jive talking’, professing to ‘bust a rhyme’, and replete with record scratching and gorilla noises. These days, it would be sufficient to end careers, but back then it was just horrid.
A much bigger problem comes when Sylvia gets engaged and decides to move to England with her snooty upper-class director fiancé. Rather than setting up a source of conflict to be overcome, the movie actually takes us there. We go from leafy Manhattan and lunch at the Loeb Boathouse at Central Park to narrow English country roads, muddy fields, and a mass of sheep chafing the nether regions. The dream of the 80s is well and truly over.
Nancy Travis as Sylvia is likeable but too arch with her honeyed English accent. She spoils some of the easy chemistry between Peter, Michael, and Jack, respectively Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson. The secondary roles which come to dominate once we arrive in England are grotesques: Edward, Sylvia’s fiancé, is a palpable villain with his long hair, patterned vests, and superficial manners; while Elspeth, the headmistress of Pileforth Academy to which Mary has been deceitfully enrolled, turns out to be a good egg but spends most of the film lusting haplessly after Peter. An accurate representation of the countrified English upper-class perhaps, but revolting rather than funny.
It doesn’t help that Danson – apparently preoccupied for much of the filming schedule – only arrives in England at the tail end of the film, and then mostly in disguise, stalling for time as the substitute vicar as the trio seek to bring a halt to Sylvia’s wedding. The amusement for the audience is in watching Danson ham it up, rather than for anything the device adds to the film’s pace, plot, or sense of character. In the end, Three Men and a Little Lady is an unnecessary sequel, which swaps the sun-dappled and vibrant for something dour, dowdy, and utterly formulaic.
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