Butler's Cinema Scene

Daniel Yelsky and Jenna Fischer in "A Little Help"

“A LITTLE HELP”  My rating: C+ (Now playing at area theaters)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

I’ve a soft spot for Jenna Fischer, whose girl-next-door blend of beauty and non-threatening sexuality has helped keep TV’s “The Office” percolating nicely for several seasons.

Fischer gets a rare leading role in “A Little Help,” a dour comedy about a recent widow trying without much success to get her life back on track. This low-keyed affair from writer/director Michael J. Weithorn, alternately sad and a bit absurd, is perfectly watchable without really making a big impression.

Laura (Fischer) is a wife, mother and dental hygienist who suspects her husband Bob (Chris O’Donnell) is having a fling with his secretary. All she really knows for sure is that she and Bob haven’t had sex in months and she’s feeling a bit frantic.

Then Bob keels over from a heart attack and Laura is left to cope with their adolescent son,  the overweight, angry and largely unloveable Dennis (Daniel Yelsky), who tries to fit in at school by lying that his late father was a firefighter who died in the World Trade Center (the film is set in 2002, apparently for no other reason than to introduce this subplot).

Laura must also cope with her smothering, controlling family. Mom and Dad (Leslie Ann Warren, Ron Liebman) are pushy enough, but especially grating is her domineering sister Kathy (Brooke Smith). To further complicate matters, Kathy’s henpecked husband Paul (Rob Benedict) has long loved Laura from afar.

This’ll be messy.

“A Little Help” doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s less a driven narrative than a gentle character study. But it provides Fischer with a flawed, frustrated and confused character to chew on; meanwhile the camera drinks in the actress’s non-glamorous beauty.

Fair enough.

|Robert W. Butler

“