Since the world is clearly in desperately burning need of another Heartwarming Feelgood It’s-Grim-Oop-North triumph-over-adversity crowdpleaser, it is about to be treated to one. Calendar Girls is already racking up comparisons to 1997’s astonishingly over-rated The Full Monty, and its similarities are so glaring as to practically invite accusations of plagiarism: it’s set in Yorkshire, it’s about a gang of conventionally unattractive people taking their clothes off for the presumed hilarity, and it’s about as amusing and exciting as a wet weekend in Scunthorpe. I could be wrong, but I suspect British audiences will adore it.
Literally another Full Monty with genders reversed and a more middle-class setting, Calendar Girls’ plot involves a pair of fiftysomethingpals (played reliably if predictably by Julie Walters and Helen Mirren) who are also members of the local Womens’ Institute. When Walters’ husband drops dead after a nasty bout of leukemia, the grieving widow is left to mourn with Mirren and pals, who collectively then come up with the terrifying idea of putting together a traditional Womens’ Institute calendar. With a difference: every pic will feature a smiling butt-naked WI babe old enough to be your granny.
Before all the horny teenage boys out there start flocking to the multiplexes with their pulses racing, it needs to be pointed out that Calendar Girls manages the astonishing feat of being more boring than a TV infomercial. It’s clearly well-intentioned enough, with the two leads doing their level-best to lift it out of the murk, but almost all of the gags are so lame, predictable and old it is a genuine miracle they found test audiences who actually laughed: Mirren’s teenage son, for instance, ‘unexpectedly’ arrives home with his mate at the precise moment she’s busy whipping off her bra in front of the whole crew.
There’s plenty of female bonding, with many picturesque collective walks in the Yorkshire dales and the like, a traditionally feelgood ending, and it’s just about faintly conceivable that Calendar Girls might genuinely entertain elderly viewers on the one-movie-a-year programme. For anyone else, though, the overwhelming pure unadulterated tedium of the enterprise should be prohibitive.