ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 20, 1996 TAG: 9604230050
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
The first thing Ricki Lake's character does after she's handed her newborn son in the movie "Mrs. Winterbourne" is lie. But she tells her baby she's lying, and that makes it OK.
And that's the thing about this movie. What the heck, let's lead with the moral: It's OK to be dishonest and profit by your dishonesty as long as you come clean at some point.
Is this a moral for the millennium? Seems more like a moral for the '80s. Actually, this movie seems like a leftover from the sad period in our recent history, during which no prisoner was left untaken on the road to the good life.
Lake's character, Connie Doyle - the supposed hero of this tale - is a runaway from New Jersey who shacks up with the first creepy guy she meets when she hits New York City. The creepy guy's name is Steve, and he's played by Loren Dean, who looks for all the world like Richard Thomas' - aka John Boy Walton's - evil twin. Soon, Connie is with child. So Steve dumps her, and she's living on the streets and almost full term when she is caught up in a stampede of frenzied New York commuters and inexplicably winds up on a train headed for Boston.
A nice-looking guy named Hugh (Brendan Fraser) befriends Connie and introduces her to his extremely pregnant wife, Patricia, (Susan Haskell). The three are just getting to know each other, darn it, trying on each other's jewelry and clothing (the women, that is) when - in a sudden burst of reality- the train crashes.
Now: Start thinking "While You Were Sleeping" and you're on the right track. Connie, still wearing Patricia's wedding band and some clothes the woman let her borrow, wakes up in a hospital to find herself the proud mother of a baby boy and a brand new identity - that of Patricia Winterbourne, the wife of wealthy Hugh Winterbourne. Connie's newfound friends both died in the train crash, en route to introduce Patricia to Hugh's mother (Shirley MacLaine). So there's no one around to point out that Connie isn't Patricia.
Least of all Connie. Oh, she tries. You know how people try in movies. They start sentences over and over and over, "But - but - there's been a terrible mistake - but - but - you don't understand ... " and their hands are patted and they're told they must be very tired and shaken up from the train wreck and all.
That way, we can forgive - at least we're supposed to forgive - the character for being a liar. And besides, deep down the character is a good person who deserves a break from life anyway.
It's life's little affirmative action plan, a la Hollywood.
Well, never mind. And double-never-mind Ricki Lake. I don't know how she is as a talk-show host, but she's an awful actress and a deeply unattractive person that makes the subsequent train (there's that word again) of events even more unbelievable. Chiefly, that Hugh's surviving twin brother would fall madly in love with her and make an honest woman of her.
So to speak.
The only kindness this movie does its audience is through MacLaine, who is the matriarch, Grace Winterbourne. She's become quite a salty old dog, and it becomes her.
She's too good for this movie, which doesn't have the decency to be honest about its dishonesty.
E-mail Katherine Reed at movieyakaol.com
Mrs. Winterbourne
**
(PG-13 for strong language) a Tri Star Pictures release showing at the Grandin Theatre and Tanglewood Mall, 104 minutes.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Ricki Lake (left) and Shirley MacLaine sing a duet in aby CNBscene from "Mrs. Winterbourne." color.