One Fine Day

One Fine Day is a charming romantic comedy that took a lot of knocks in the press but that I nonetheless let myself be beguiled by. One of the critics complained about its great predictability. For example, Michelle Pfeiffer enters her boss's outer office carrying a fine cardboard model of an architectural project she has made. Close-ups of the lady's legs AND her son Sammy's remote-controlled racing car. Yes, it would be predictable if Michelle fell flat on her face over the car, but the critic must have slept through the film, for Michelle steps lightly and elegantly over the car, whereupon she trips over something else! An elegant play on our expectations.

One Fine Day is perhaps a touch too cliché-ridden in its depiction of beautiful single career men and women with adorable and terribly annoying offspring, but the film has a pretty well-turned plot, and the chemistry between Pfeiffer and the great charmer George Clooney is hard to fault.

Michelle plays single mother Melanie, and Clooney plays the journalist Jack, who becomes a single father for a week while his ex-wife is on holiday. He naturally forgets an arrangement to pick up Sammy, who is in the same class as Jack's daughter Maggie, so both children are late for a school outing. Disaster, for Melanie has to present her project that same day, while Jack has to save his honour at the newspaper, which he has of course put at stake himself. They cannot get anyone else to mind the children, so they have to help each other out. At first glance it looks as though the parents will do anything for their children, but when you think about it, the upshot is that career comes above all. You easily forget that while watching the film, though.