Hunting for fresh challenges

From a child star in the 1970s TV serials, she has matured into one of today's most respected screen talents, with an Oscar- winning performance in 1997. As her new film, ``Pay It Forward'' opens here, ANAND PARTHASARATHY examines the screen career of Helen Hunt.

WHEN DID we last see a product of the Hollywood system who was equally adept at slapstick comedy and in domestic drama; who doesn't have to deliberately play down her intelligence, so that male audiences did not feel threatened?

One has to go a long way back - perhaps to the Katherine Hepburn of the 1940s and 50s. Jim Brooks thinks a new Hepburn for the new millennium is already amongst us. The writer-director of the 1997 film, ``As Good As It Gets'' - the film which saw both male and female stars Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, walk away with acting Oscars - is quite sure that his lead actress ``has the whole package'' - like Hepburn, she can play an heiress one day, a spinster the next.

Richard Corliss writing in Time magazine, sees other Hepburn parallels: ``She attracts men and appeals to other women, by being her own complicated self. Determined woman, staunch friend, strong mate...the sensible siren''.

Since 1992, she has starred in, and occasionally directed, a long-running American television ``sitcom'', ``Made About You'' - which has won her and co-star Paul Reiser, Emmy Awards - the TV equivalent of Oscars - with boring regularity.

Last year was a busy and intensely creative period, even by Helen Hunt's own exacting standards, with four films released in the space of six months. First came a relative flop: a rare new film from veteran director Robert Altman, ``Dr. T and the Women'', where she acted opposite Richard Gere. In ``Cast Away'', she is the girl friend Tom Hanks left behind, when he is stranded on a deserted island for four years. The film is currently on show in India.

So is her next vehicle, ``What Women Want'', where she constitutes a professional challenge for a chauvinistic Chicago executive played by Mel Gibson. An accident with a hair dryer gives Mel an electric shock- and the ability to ``hear'' women's thought. This is great, because he can now steal all the creative ideas from the fertile brain of the woman (Hunt) who beat him to become boss.

This week sees the South India release of Helen Hunt's fourth film of 2000: a quintessential ``feel good'' weepie which teams her with fellow Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey (for ``American Beauty'', last year) and the precocious child star Haley Joel Osment, ``discovered'' by India-born director Manoj Night Shyamalan and used so effectively in his cult film ``The Sixth Sense''. The title of the new film gives away the core of the plot: ``Pay It Forward'', a biblical exhortation to do a good deed without waiting to repay one - to ``pay it forward'' instead of merely paying back some one else's good turn.

The idea belongs to seventh grade student Trevor McKinney (Osment) whose mother Arlene, a waitress, struggles against adversity and alcoholism to bring up her boy alone. When Trevor's Social Studies teacher Eugene Simonet (Spacey) asks his pupils to think of something that can change the world, the boy comes up with the naive ``pyramid'' scheme: do a good turn to three people, each of whom, will do a good turn for three others and so on.

Trevor's own good turn involves bringing some light into his mother's life, something her absentee husband (Jon Bon Jovi) can't provide - but is his teacher the guy to do it? A side plot features a hardboiled journalist who is himself the recipient of ``a random, senseless act of kindness'' - so he starts documenting the trail of goodness set off by Trevor.

But this is a less-than-perfect world - and some critics have cringed at what they call the ``manipulative mawkishness'' dished out by the film's woman director Mimi Leder. ``Has its heart in the right place - but not its screenplay,'' wrote another reviewer. ``The most oppressive feel-good picture in movie history,'' said a third. There have been comparisons with the classic films of Frank Capra (``It's a Wonderful Life!''), but the same writers find the new film full of Capra corn, without the Capra craft.

Opinions may vary about how many handkerchieves one needs to carry, when going to see this tear-jerker; but there is near unanimity that this is one of Helen Hunt's best yet, certainly her strongest performance of the year. The child star of the mid- 1970s television serials like ``Swiss Family Robinson'', and the 1980s hospital soaps like ``St. Elsewhere''; the teenaged actress who took on a room full of chimpanzees (and Mathew Broderick) in the 1987 drama ``Project X'', has indeed come a long way down the professional road. She had to wait for the mid-1990s for critical and commercial success on the big screen. Indeed, the two came in back-to-back productions: the all action, ``wall-to-wall FX- laden'' 1996 adventure ``Twister'', finds her rushing into the eye of the hurricane with Bill Paxton. A year later, she won unqualified acclaim for her role of a compassionate (if quick- witted) waitress and single-mother of an asthmatic child, who succeeds in taming a seasoned misanthrope with an ``obsessive- compulsive'' disorder (Jack Nicholson) in ``As Good As It Gets''. Her `Best Actress' Oscar-winning role, brought out her capacity for what her executive producer on televisions, Victor Levin, calls her ``alacritive wit - not just funny, but fast''.

It is a combination that should work wonders when the direction is handled by a past master at both - like, Woody Allen. These days, Helen Hunt is working for him on ``Curse of the Jade Scorpion'' which is due for release in June.

Like Jodie Foster, another former child actress, Helen Hunt, has made it in adulthood to the top rung on the Hollywood ladder. At 38, she is already what co-star Jack Nicholson calls ``a juggernaut of talent''.

Clearly, Helen's creative hunt has just begun.

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