Parenting Trips

CAST: Katherine Heigl,Josh Duhamel,Josh Lucas

rating: ***

To have an infant left for you in the will by your best friends,and who you have to raise with a person who couldn’t be more different than you,is certainly not life as anybody knows it. The film gets around that little problem by making the parent who left behind that will “a junior partner in a law firm”. A parent may cringe at the thought,but lawyers — they can think of anything.

Holly (Heigl) and Messer (Duhamel),cast suddenly in the roles of parent to a one-year-old,spend quite a bit of time in the film trying to figure out why. Thankfully,you won’t.

Unlikely as the plot may be,and likely as it is to end only one way,when two opposite forces come around one adorable child,the film keeps you occupied. Heigl does what she is best at — playing an undecided,unlucky-in-love woman,who not only cooks well but runs a successful bakery — while Duhamel manages to make “the jock sports channel technical director who lives in T-shirts,jeans and a baseball hat” charming enough to make this work. The winner,however,are the Clagett triplets who together play Sophie,the child that brings Holly and Messer under one luxurious roof. The film handles the problem of raising her — from diapers and feeding to work hours and sleeping time,to the time she takes her first steps — with a deft,light touch. Heigl and Duhamel go through the frustrations and joys of new parenthood,compounded in their case by the fact that they aren’t really her parents.

The neighbours are a welcome addition,as is a social service employee who has seen enough of life as we know it to take a line on it. The customary fight is where the film crawls. But by then the small enough battle that this run-of-the-mill rom-com is fighting has been won.