Yours, Mine & Ours (2005)

Yours, Mine & Ours arrives as a 2005 remake of a 1968 comedy, and it carries that inheritance the way a cruise ship carries barnacles. Dennis Quaid plays a Coast Guard admiral who runs his eight children like a detachment of enlisted men. Rene Russo plays a handbag designer with ten children and a laissez-faire philosophy. They reunite at a reunion, marry on the spot, and eighteen children then attempt to sabotage the union by weaponizing the couple's incompatible worldviews. The jokes are pratfalls. The plot is a stampede toward a lighthouse. Critics gave it six percent. Audiences gave it an A minus. Both camps are correct.

The family includes six adopted children of assorted ethnic backgrounds, a detail that sits inside the frame without demanding applause. This is representation by arithmetic, not by argument. Nobody explains it. Nobody interrogates it. The film moves on to the paint fight. We can credit the casting for what it is: a blended household that happens to look like a blended household, meaning the demographic variety registers without ever becoming a thesis. No racial consciousness is on offer here, no environmental sermon, no dismantling of the wage relation. Helen has a career, and the film is content to let her have it.

No character announces a pronoun. No villain turns out to be a fossil fuel executive. The film's most subversive gesture is a pot-bellied pig, and even the pig is compliant. This is a harmless, dated, forgettable comedy that asks nothing of its audience beyond a mild chuckle and a ninety-minute absence of thought. The cultural historian examining it will find little to annotate. The picture predates the era of messaging, or at least predates the era when messaging became obligatory. It wants the children to stop fighting and the boat to reach the harbor. In 2005 that was enough. It is not enough for anything now, but it was enough then.