By Tricia Olszewski
If a movie is based on a true story, can it rightly be accused of ripping off another film? Calendar Girls, it seems, is a case of art imitating life imitating art. The plot follows a group of women, all middle-aged and unashamedly un-nipped/tucked, who decide that the best way to make some money is by taking off their clothes. The women are British and quirky. In their proper Yorkshire town, their brazen act is at first cause for scandal, then celebration.
Whatever their inspiration, the real-life women of the Rylstone and District Women's Institute, a social club that gathers for lectures on topics such as "the fascinating world of rugs—and all forms of carpeting," decided to go the full monty in 1998. When John Baker, the husband of one of the group's members, died from lymphoma, the WI added a twist to its annual calendar in order to raise money in his memory: The usual photographic subjects of appropriately decorative sticky buns and pressed flowers would be used to hide the naughty bits of inappropriately nude WIers.
The predictable but charming Calendar Girls presents the WI group as less ladies who lunch than cliquey schoolgirls, sharply divided into bookworms and troublemakers , all presided over by the marmish Marie (Geraldine James). Helen Mirren stars as Chris, the brains behind the calendar and black sheep of the bunch. A WI member mostly out of boredom, Chris is criticized for offering activity ideas such as "vodka-tasting night" and defends herself with "I'm not a total dead loss as a woman!" when her friends express shock that she actually prepared a cake for a bake-off (though it turns out to be store-bought). Julie Walters, the Harry Potter films' Mrs. Weasley, plays John's wife, Annie (here renamed Clarke).
First-time feature writers Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi conceived their characters with a sugared tartness that helps keep the movie's feel-goodness in check, even as the story glosses over such unpleasantness as John's prolonged illness. (His death comes minutes after his announcement that he's ill.) A smattering of conflict near the end also rings false, feeling as if it were tacked on for depth—of course, even at just 108 minutes, Calendar Girls' one-joke plot threatens to wear thin.
Still, the cast, drawn mostly from the cozier reaches of British TV, play well together, with the friendship between Mirren's eye-rolling but never bitchy Chris, Walters' upbeat but heartbroken Annie, and Penelope Wilton's soon-to-blossom wallflower Ruth seeming especially natural. The actresses' camaraderie is especially evident during a scene in which they discuss the project with a photographer, Lawrence (played with nervous exasperation by Philip Glenister), and at the subsequent photo shoot. From their tense drawing of cards to see who will be photographed first to their whispered asides of "Bad girl!" and "Bun-toucher!" when Lawrence admonishes them for messing with his setup, the women consistently project the mutual ease of lifelong friends.
Most the movie's humor is as successful as it is dry, especially the discriminating reactions to the calendar from local men: "You're nude in the Telee-graph!" a gray-haired man says to his wife while reading the morning paper. "Can you pass the bacon?" Calendar Girls' biggest problem is that its emotional apex, which comes with the unforeseen success of the calendar, takes place shortly after its midpoint: What should have been the payoff is merely a setup for the suddenly famous characters to sink back to the normality of family problems and fetching the newspaper. But this is only a quibble. Even when "normal," the women of Calendar Girls are rather fun to have hanging around.