Taking
Care of Business
Film · Vol 21 · . · 4/5/00
Nurse-turned-actor-turned-director
Bonnie Hunt brings her benevolent touch to Return to Me
It's clear from the outset that Bonnie Hunt is used to taking care
of people. "Cream or sugar?" she asks, fetching coffee
from a side table before we begin the interview. After stirring
the cup's contents a bit, she pauses for moment and leans in close.
"I don't know," she says, appearing genuinely concerned.
"Usually, when the cream is breaking up like that, it means
it's not good. Are you sure it's all right? Do you want another
cup?"
In an industry where a walk-on part in a USA Network movie inspires
diva-scale demands, Hunt--who announces that the "makeup artist
to the stars" who's fussing with her lipstick is slumming today--seems
uncommonly, well, Midwestern in her demeanor. This is, after all,
the nurse-turned-actor whose husband made her fire her first personal
assistant the day she picked up the assistant's dry cleaning. Hunt's
second personal assistant was hired during the shooting of her directorial
debut, Return to Me, a similarly Midwestern romantic comedy in which
blue-collar widower Bob Rueland (David Duchovny) falls in love with
Grace (Minnie Driver), the sheltered transplant patient who receives
his late wife's heart.
"I got the budget, and there was money allotted for a PA,"
explains Hunt. "So I hired my friend Holly [Wortell], because
she was going through a divorce. I told her to think of it as a
free paycheck." Wortell, an old friend from Hunt's stint with
Second City in the mid-Eighties, also has a small role in the film
as an annoying blind date. "She has been in everything I've
done," says Hunt. "That's her work--me."
If Hunt's demeanor is out of the ordinary by Tinseltown standards,
so is her movie, which she wrote with another old Second City friend,
Don Lake. Set in Chicago, in the bosom of an Irish-Italian extended
family and the sort of old neighborhood that seems to have gone
the way of the streetcar, Return to Me features characters who are
unabashedly religious without being unbalanced or fanatical; a dating
couple that never hops into bed; and a God who moves characters
like chess pieces. And yet such an old-fashioned approach seems
perfectly in keeping with a woman who credits her mother as her
greatest directorial influence, and who claims she modeled her respectful
interactions with the crew after the working methods of her father,
an electrician for the local board of education. Keeping it all
in the family, Hunt shot the film in Chicago and stocked the cast
with relatives--a considerable population, given that she was born
the sixth of seven children in a small Irish Catholic constellation
on the northwest side of Chicago. Likewise, the old neighborhood
itself gets ample screen time: The Irish-Italian eatery that serves
as home base for Grace's family and friends is an actual restaurant
owned by folks Hunt grew up with. "At the end of the day, if
[Return to Me] doesn't work out, if it doesn't make much money,
it can be my home movie," she says.
It's a quaint notion. Most home movies, though, aren't bankrolled
by MGM, nor do they feature, say, Carroll O'Connor's first appearance
on the big screen in a quarter-century. Such a down-home approach
also belies the long odds against Hunt's position at the helm of
a boat this size. Always a supporting character, never a star, she
has appeared as the mom, the friend, or the sister in studio movies
such as Beethoven, Random Hearts, and Jerry Maguire. Two forays
into TV were truncated, "politically exhausting" enterprises.
In both cases--The Building in 1993, and The Bonnie Hunt Show (co-produced
by David Letterman) in 1995--she wrote, produced, and starred in
a CBS series set in Chicago, stocked with old Second City friends
and based loosely on events from her actual life. In both cases,
she fought execs who wanted to replace her friends with better-known
TV actors--and in both cases, her shows were summarily canceled.
Many of the same elements are back in Return to Me, from the cameos
by old friends to the plots borrowed from real life (Hunt's parents
also met by coincidence). But one difference seems to be that Hunt
has learned to stand her ground at the beginning of the process
rather than at the end. In shopping her latest script to studios,
she took an uncompromising approach, having learned the hard way
from her TV shows. "I would say [to execs], 'Here's what you
get with me,'" she recalls. "I made it very clear that
I would be doing this story with these characters in this way--fantastical
elements and all. And MGM really responded to that."
If Return to Me's tale of transplanted love is improbable, it's
also executed with a full-on faith that borders on naiveté.
Such faith can be as disarming as a Hollywood director who pours
your coffee and asks about your marriage--and Return to Me demands
a similar level of commitment from its audience. Unlike Moonstruck
(from which it borrows), Return to Me features romantic tribulations
created by divine intervention rather than character flaws, meaning
that the protagonists are mostly required to adjust to obstacles
imposed upon them.
Some may be tempted to call such guilelessness a tall order in these
irony-driven, hipper-than-thou times. After all, practically no
one lives in tight-knit, homogeneous communities like this anymore--and
compared to what happened when they did, Return to Me seems closer
to the version of the story that the kids were told. Today, even
kids are in on the joke. But to the degree that MGM has reported
higher test-screening numbers for Return to Me than any of its films
since The Birdcage, maybe the movie's quaintness is a box-office
virtue as well.
In any case, it's clear that the necessary suspension of disbelief
is present in the director herself. "I think [divine intervention]
does happen in life, only you don't see it," says Hunt, who,
describing her own beliefs as "Catholic lite," admits
to thinking that most people are quite innocent. "I mean, maybe
there are people out there who are just having sex all the time,"
she says, "but that's not my life."
Return to Me starts Friday at area theaters.
Film · Vol 21 · . · 4/5/00 »
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