Rent Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

Greek comedy. - Mighty Aphrodite review by Steve

Woody plays a sports reporter who adopts a boy with his wife Helena Bonham Carter and is so enamoured by him that he decides to track down the real parents. He discovers that the mother is a porn actor/prostitute (played by Mira Sorvino) who was impregnated by an unknown client.

Woody seeks to turn her life around on the assumption that one day his boy will want to meet his mother, but also because of a developing paternal interest in her problems. The director adds some weight to this slender premise by attaching a Greek chorus to comment on the action,  to recommend caution and to aid the plot development.

 The film is swallowed whole by Sorvino's superb comic performance which deservedly won an Oscar. It's a poignant characterisation, and she is wonderful at releasing the comedy from her rather marginal understanding of the world she lives in (and she looks incredible).

Woody's dialogue is quite explicit, certainly in comparison with the sexual modesty of his early films and it benefits him to shake up his vocabulary a little.  It's a successful, funny and warm comedy and if the critics were bored because he had made so many of these by now, that doesn't make the film any less of a pleasure.