Hush

Jessica Lange, the queen of the mad southern belles, plays Martha in Hush, a woman who has a suitably, mad, manipulative view of the world and in particular, of her in laws.

Martha has been living in her slightly run down Kentucky mansion/horse stud; a spectacular mansion with suitably tall, white columns and sweeping meadows for the horses; and a long gone husband to account for the lack of properly looked after and groomed gee gees.

Her son Jackson (Johnathon Schaech) has found himself a tty girl friend Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) in New York, who it turns out just might have to deal with a very questionable prospective mother in law.

You'd think that the ingredients might be right. Gwyneth Paltrow is an attractive enough leading lady, even if she still needs to show more than average skills in front of the camera.

And the setting seems just made for Jessica Lange, who's a great nut. In particular see Blue Sky for proof of that. You'd think that she would just delightedly gobble up this sort of southern fried chicken with relish.

But Hush suffers from indigestion. Perhaps the pace of the first two thirds of the film was too slow. Perhaps Paltrow, who again and true to form, added almost nothing of value to the film was the problem. It takes more than a lovely smile and a skeleton frame to make a good actress.

Johnathon Schaech on the other hand managed the part of Jackson capably. He has viously starred in The Doom Generation, How To Make An American Quilt and That Thing You Do!

But still, almost right from the beginning, Hush didn't hang together properly. You couldn't quite accept many of the exchanges between in particular Martha and her son Jackson, even if Martha was a nut.

Hush does sent challenges for the cast and crew, Martha has a peculiar view of the people around her, but somehow this woman who at once loves her son, but then rejects the woman he choses for her wife, or at least only accepts Helen on very particular grounds, often just isn't credible.

And then there's the final medical, gynaecological, credibility insult. Helen has a particularly horrific childbirth, an event that would have sapped, indeed killed most women, or at least we are lead to believe.

A few hours later she appears scrubbed up, lethally provocative and able to execute a lithe skip, an adroit small leap in the mansion's kitchen that would do a healthy 18 year old proud. By then all the audience must groan with disbelief.