Raising Helen

Helen (Kate Hudson), a young woman who thinks she has everything she wants, including a glamorous job in a modeling agency. She gets to go to parties and wear chic clothes and be the cool aunt to her sisters' children, the fun one who thinks that fake IDs are great and shows that you never really have to grow up. But then Helen's sister and brother-in-law are killed in an accident and it turns out that they left their three children not to the older, stable, potpourri-loving earth mother sister Jenny (Joan Cusack) but to Helen. Helen is willing, if a bit shell-shocked. But for the first time she has taken on some problems that can't be solved with a dazzling smile. The three children show her how messy, exhausting, painful, more exhausting, expensive, scary, difficult, and then even more exhausting life can be. She will think of it as an unbearable burden. She will have to leave Manhattan for Brooklyn and take time from her job for an emergency involving shoelace-tying. She will make mistakes and let people down. She will worry that she is not up to the challenge. And she will get a chance to find out whether she is.