MINI MOVIE REVIEW:
A sweet and charming true story about the empowerment of women whose bodies are aging but whose minds and hearts are as big as the extravagantly beautiful Yorkshire hill country that surrounds their small English hamlet.

The members of the local Women's Institute are shocked when the beloved husband of Annie (Julie Walters), one of their members, unexpectedly dies from cancer. Life, however, must go on not only for the bereaved wife and her best friend, but also for the other members of their group. And at this moment they are deeply involved with the creation and the production of a calendar to be used for their annual fund raising drive, and a new theme, usually something about gardening or cooking, has yet to be selected.

Annie's best friend, Chris (Helen Mirren), notices a tastefully nude female pin up calendar in a local garage and also discovers her son's trove of girlie magazines hidden under his bed. She hits upon the radical idea of using their own aging bodies in tasteful poses to raise money for the local hospital. This idea meets with a lot of resistance from their completely bewildered husbands, their young children who are highly embarrassed by this gambit, and even the the head of their own local women's group, who wants to avoid such a controversial theme at all costs.

But they beat the odds and pull it off. The novelty of the idea and the overwhelming admiration of thousands of people for these plucky and courageous older "babes" makes their calendar a smash hit that to this day has raised more than a half a million pounds. This has been more than enough money to build a brand new cancer clinic for their local hospital when their original goal had been only to raise about 900 pounds for a new sofa for the hospital waiting room.
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MOVIE CRITIQUE:
"Calendar Girls" is one of those movies that is a mile wide in beauty and an inch deep in complexity and emotional density. Charming, affable, and even quite humorous in parts, this movie is still a rather weakly written retelling of the true life story of the members of a women's' group in a small Yorkshire hamlet who make the gutsy decision to use tasteful pictures of their aging bodies as props in a calendar that will, hopefully, raise money for a favored local charity.

There is not much of a story here and what serious stories there are in this movie are not always followed up on or even fully developed. Marital issues follow from their decisions that are not fully explored. Chris' husband, Rod (Ciarán Hinds), loses not only her help with his floral delivery service but also her place in their marital bedroom when she goes off on this binge of creative excess. Their teenaged son, the owner of those magazines, has problems with drugs and social development which are passed over and left behind.

A brief moment of glory on a first class plane flight to Los Angeles for an appearance on the Jay Leno Show, a possible advertisement for pay, and their reveling in the luxurious decadence of expansive Hollywood hotel suites all fly by with questions as to how their moment in the bright glare of publicity has affected the other calendar girls besides Chris and Annie (Julie Walters), the two best friends and the stars of this movie.

Fortunately, "Calendar Girls" does have a few things going for it. First, the glorious cinematography shows their small village in the rugged hill country of Yorkshire in all its complete and truly breathtaking glory. Their little English hamlet partially fills the valley beside a gushing brook with the picturesque homes looking like they have been largely untouched for a century. Surrounding the town itself is a grass covered countryside largely barren of trees so that the rugged boulder strewn hills loom from every angle. Yorkshire could not have asked for a better travelogue or a better film to showcase the extraordinary beauty of this area to all us Yanks who will now be salivating at any opportunity to visit this romantic countryside.

"Calendar Girls" also does not lack for talent in the acting category as almost every member of the royalty of English actors is in this film. Many of them have been seen in numerous BBC imports shown on our Public Broadcasting stations. Of these actors, Helen Mirren as Chris might be the most familiar to us with her extensive repertoire of films and her recent starring turn in a BBC/PBS detective series. Julie Walters as Annie first charmed us starring opposite Michael Caine in 1983's "Educating Rita," and more recently played the mother in the 2000 breakout hit, "Billy Elliot," which was mentioned for numerous film awards. Walters is, of course, now even more famous as wizard wannabe Ron Weasely's mother, Molly, in all the Harry Potter films. Ciarán Hinds starred in one of my favorite Jane Austen BBC films, "Persuasion," and he also had a small role in 2002's "The Road to Perdition."

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. There is no shortage of acting talent in "Calendar Girls," and there is no shortage of scenery to admire in this movie as well. It's a cute movie, but it is also as light as a soufflé. Just don't expect anything deep in this sweet dessert of a movie or you will be disappointed.