Helen Hunt Filmography Part 21: Strong, Independent Women
Helen Hunt goes into role model, mentor mode in these three movies.
This movie follows the journey of Annie Parker, a woman who loses her mother and sister to breast cancer and herself survives three incidences of breast cancer. Samantha Morton gives a warm, honest, and emotional performance as Annie Parker and her struggles with grief, loss, and betrayal and her fierce determination to find the reason why breast cancer stalks her family.
Helen Hunt plays Dr. Mary Claire King, the researcher who discovered the BRCA gene, which links to higher risk of breast cancer. This should have been a very good role, but they forgot to give her anything to do. I’m not one to turn every movie into a mini-series, but this story could have benefitted from either being longer, or being two movies–one about Annie Parker and one about Dr. King.
The film briefly implies that Dr. King faced a lot of resistance to her work from systemic misogyny that doesn’t take women’s research and ideas seriously, and doesn’t value a topic that only affects 2.3 million women every year. That struggle alone would make for an interesting movie.
Helen Hunt plays Kathy Bresnahan, the coach of a high school volley ball team. When the star player and emotional heart of the team dies, the players struggle to recover and continue with their season.
It’s a pretty standard feel-good sports movie. I honestly could not tell any of the girls on the team apart…and they even wear numbers to help differentiate themselves. Clearly it could have used more character development.
As the coach, Helen Hunt, is vaguely antisocial, and lonely. There’s not much backstory or development of that either.
But who needs therapy or character development when you have sports? Yeah! <sarcastic>
A pretty standard enemies to lovers high school rom-com that uses competition in the MOST ANNOYING extracurricular activity as the premise. Debate kids are the worst. The only thing worse than regular debate kids, is homeschool debate kids—I speak from personal trauma.
The movie also explores the pressure that teenagers at exclusive prep-schools feel to excel and get into the best colleges. To decompress Lona (Sami Gayle) and Bennett (Jacob Lattimore) visit Kathy (Helen Hunt) the school counselor whose office holds the eponymous candy jar.
Kathy is the comedic bright spot in a movie mostly filled with montages of teenagers spewing facts at an incomprehensible speed and pitch. When he is freaking out about getting into Yale, she tells Bennett to go to the prom because the world needs more men who are good kissers. What the world, and this movie, desperately needs is her humorous counterpoint to these neurotic teenagers, but it criminally underutilizes this comedic asset.
