Jack (Richard E. Grant) and Sarah (Imogen Stubbs) are a young couple setting up a new house for them and the baby that’s coming.
He’s so nervous that when he should take her to the hospital he falls down the stairs instead so she has to accompany him in the ambulance. Sarah unfortunately dies giving birth to a little girl. He finds out from his mother (Margaret=Judi Dench) when he finally comes to. It’s such a terrible thing he doesn’t know how to cope with it. He breaks stuff, drinks himself into oblivion and spends his time with William (Ian McKellen), a homeless guy. Both his parents and Sarah’s mother Phil (Eileen Atkins) are worried about him, until his father comes up with a plan. They leave the baby on his bed while he’s sleeping. At first he calls them, wanting them to take the baby away again, but then he has to take care of the little crying one and obviously he very soon grows so fond of it that he doesn’t want to leave her with his parents anymore. He calls her Sarah, and for her he gets his life back on track. He tries bringing her to work with him but he works in a law firm and that can’t work out in the long term, so he starts looking for a nanny. He dismisses the efficient nanny the agency sends to them because he wants someone who can love the baby more than someone who can simply take care of her. He meets waitress Amy (Samantha Mathis) the day she loses her job (because she spent too much time with his baby instead of the customers, because she spilled coffee over a guy harassing her, because she tripped over Jack’s baby stuff and broke all the coffee cups for that same guy’s table..). He meets her again in a shop, while changing the baby in the Lady’s room (which is also the mothers’ room, so to change the baby he has to go in there). He asks her to work for him as a nanny, and she accepts, but things start off quite difficult. He meant it as a day job while she fought she’d live there. His mother is not nice to her. Both Margaret and Phil are there often and William is now working there looking after the baby. Things are not too easy, but knowing that someone is with little Sarah now Jack starts going out more often and starts dating Anna from work. Amy can’t find a place she can afford so she keeps living there. When Amy gets angry at him because he didn’t hear Sarah screaming, too busy making out with Anna, he says that she’s jealous and that he never pictured Anna as a new mother for Sarah, he simply wanted a bit of fun and “she knows that”, which was a jerk thing to say and a jerk thing to think for that matter. Anna heard it and vanished of course.
William left after fighting with Amy, and Amy left after fighting with Jack, accusing him of never spending his time with the baby and being too selfish and only thinking about himself.
Of course he misses her a lot. Of course what he was going through was terrible, the pain for the wife he lost was always with him, but nobody would excuse a woman for so long, everybody would blame her for not dedicating her whole life to the baby, so Amy was right in speaking to him like that. I’m only angry that they wrote that scene after they had shared a kiss, because this way it just looks like she talked out of jealousy in seeing him with another woman.
Anyway, at least a month goes by without her and he misses her a lot. Phil brings them together again and he begs her to come back, and not as a nanny.
The last scene shows them as a couple, attending Phil and William’s wedding :-)
Things in favour of this movie: good actors, a few touching/meaningful scenes (like when we see Jack crying into his father’s arms), the fact that he didn’t fall for her at once but they got together only after at least a year, and the happy ending.
I wasn’t too fond of the main character Jack, but he was a good enough guy in a difficult situation, and although Amy complained that she was treated like a servant, he always treated her very well (his mother maybe did it, yeah). She said to him that that’s the English way, to treat her like a servant, but it wasn’t entirely fair, after all he let her stay in the house didn’t he? She showed up on her first day of work, late and with all her bags when he actually originally wanted her to work only until he got home from work, but he let her live there.
He was not as brilliant as I thought he'd be, but she was really nice, I liked her, and Dench, Atkins and McKellen were the gift that made this movie.
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