Most movies are contrived to some degree, but the word could have been invented for "Mrs. Winterbourne."
This reworking of "While You Were Sleeping" is loaded with coincidences, missed opportunities and mistaken identities, laced with a couple of surprisingly dark subplots.The needlessly complicated storyline revolves around transplanted New Yorker Connie Doyle (Ricki Lake), a young, homeless, unmarried pregnant woman who accidentally boards a commuter train bound for Boston instead of the subway car she wants.
On the train, she meets and is befriended by an equally pregnant woman named Patricia (Susan Haskell) and her new husband Hugh Winterbourne (Brendan Fraser). And during the few moments they spend together, Connie manages to take a monogrammed handkerchief and put on Patricia's wedding ring - just before the train crashes.
When she wakes up, Connie is in the hospital, where she's been unconscious for several days. She is also wearing the wedding ring, and her wristband says "Patricia Winterbourne." Connie immediately realizes the dilemma, of course, but upon being informed that Patricia and Hugh were killed in the train crash, she tentatively goes along with the ruse.
Later, after ingratiating herself into the fabulously wealthy family, Connie can't tell the truth because her doting "mother-in-law" (Shirley MacLaine) has a weak heart. And still later, as things get more and more complicated, the truth would ruin her chances for marriage with Hugh's twin brother (Fraser again).
You get the idea.
Among the supporting cast is a wacky, gay Cuban butler (Miguel Sandoval), who is wiser and funnier than anyone else in the family.
But there's also a violent wraparound story that has Connie pursued by her ex-boyfriend (the father of her child), who threatens to give the game away. In the opening scene, the boyfriend has been murdered, and the film plays this as a mystery, with MacLaine's character confessing to the crime as the bulk of the movie is told in flashback.
The death of MacLaine's son and real daughter-in-law and the ex-boyfriend subplot are needlessly dark and shamefully manipulative. They are also dramatically inert, merely providing an excuse for all the deceit necessary to the film's narrative thrust.
There was a time, during the movies' "golden era," when a hilarious door-slamming farce with loads of goofy supporting characters could have been made from this. But as it is, director Richard Benjamin ("My Favorite Year," "The Money Pit") and first-time screenwriters Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano haven't a clue how to make this work.
MacLaine is wonderful as an earthy woman who joined the Winterbourne family and had to earn acceptance, and Fraser isn't bad (though his main character's personality too abruptly changes from surly to giddy). Sandoval is good with what he has to do, though the material could have served him better. (And Benjamin coaxed his wife, Paula Prentiss, who has been long absent from the screen, to do a cameo early in the film as Connie's nasty nurse.)
But Lake, in the central role, seems distracted and only nominally interested in what's going on around her.
Perhaps she's spent too much time in recent years posing on her TV talk show and too little time keeping up with the craft of acting.
"Mrs. Winterbourne" is rated PG-13 for violence, profanity and vulgarity.