(Cinema for the Infirm is a feature in which I, a person with a potentially life-threatening illness, discuss films that feature a seriously ill character, for better or worse [mostly worse]. Spoilers should be expected.)
Folks, I’m just going to be straight with you: kids are dumb.
They don’t stay dumb, mind you (well, some of them don’t, at least). But, as we all did at one point, they start out as blank slates that adults must guide so that they can function in the world. Yes, kids will say things that sound clever and even insightful, but also they need to be taught how to use a fork and why they shouldn’t eat their boogers. There are few movie and TV tropes more personally irritating for me than a sage in the body of a child, who tells an adult exactly what they need to hear with the wisdom of someone decades older.
Combine that with a dying person melodrama, and baby, you got a stew going.
Like Electric Dreams, 1982’s Six Weeks was a cable staple for a couple of years, before being memory holed and never seen or talked about again. Though it’s currently available for streaming, it’s never gotten a DVD release. I’m not sure anyone would remember it at all if not for the fact that it has one of the most outrageously misguided plots for an otherwise schmaltzy quasi-romantic drama you’ll ever see. It’s like watching a car accident, then one of the cars backs up and hits the other car again.
Six Weeks opens with Patrick (Dudley Moore) and Nicole (Katherine Healy) having a meet-cute when he stops her on a country road to ask for directions to her neighbor’s house. They flirt with each other, and from that moment forward Nicole never looks at him with anything less than naked, cartoon heart eyes adoration.
This would all be very sweet if not for the fact that Patrick is in his 40s and Nicole is 12.
Patrick is a candidate for Senator in California, and Nicole instantly decides that she wants to be involved in his campaign, though whether it’s because she’s genuinely interested in politics or gobsmacked in love with him is unclear. Lucky for Patrick, Nicole’s mother, Charlotte (Mary Tyler Moore), is a fabulously wealthy cosmetics magnate who’s willing to donate a lot of money to his campaign, with just the small, eensy-weensy ask that he act as a friend and father figure to Nicole in return.
Nicole has her own demands in mind: in exchange for all her hard work, she wants Patrick (who already has a wife and child) to hook up with and eventually marry her mother, with the unspoken but heavily implied understanding that he’ll sort of be married to Nicole too.
This is clearly a recipe for disaster, scandal, and personal ruin, but nobody says no to this kid about anything, because, you see, she’s dying.
You wouldn’t know it to look at her. In the most serious case of Ali MacGraw’s Disease since Ali MacGraw herself, except for an occasionally waxy complexion Nicole looks to be in the peak of health. Terminal leukemia doesn’t stop this kid from working on a political campaign, taking professional-level ballet classes (a notably low impact activity), or being a gigantic, pushy, creepy pain in the ass to everyone around her.
She also seems to be, in typical terminal illness melodrama fashion, completely calm and accepting about her fate, discussing it with Patrick with all the casualness of what she had for dinner the previous night. For all we know, she might just be going away to boarding school, and wants to make sure her mother won’t be lonely until she comes home for winter break.
Despite all that, Patrick is so moved that he immediately devotes all his time to Nicole and Charlotte, which, bafflingly, does not seem to impact either his political campaign or his marriage in any meaningful way. It’s unclear why Charlotte, who has more money than God, seems to be utterly bereft of friends or family, but Patrick, a man of multiple talents, capably fills in many roles in her and Nicole’s life, including friend, companion, husband, would-be lover, and a replacement for a father who is never once mentioned, not even in passing.
Six Weeks is described as a “romance,” and it is disturbingly difficult to tell who the romantic leads are supposed to be here. The dual Moores generate so little chemistry with each other that they come off more like brother and sister. On the other hand, there’s a scene where Patrick and Nicole (who is 12, let me reiterate) are slow dancing while gazing meaningfully into each other’s eyes and is so uncomfortable that everyone who approved it should have been brought up on charges.
There’s some Woody Allen-esque suggestion that because Nicole is an old soul, with maturity and insight beyond her years, it makes this weird gray area she has with Patrick acceptable. However, no amount of forced justification can prepare you for the scene when Nicole asks Patrick and Charlotte when they’re finally going to “make love,” let alone the long, pointed look she gives Patrick when she mentions that she herself (a 12 year-old) hasn’t had sex yet. Nevertheless, going by both how the movie was marketed, and the weepy orchestral score (composed by Dudley Moore himself), evidently the audience is supposed to think it’s tragic that this child will never get to live out her dream of sexual relations with a middle-aged politician.
The three of them spend Christmas in New York City, because presumably Patrick’s wife and son have been eaten by mountain lions back in California, never to be seen or mentioned again. Patrick and Charlotte have a mock wedding ceremony, and given how Nicole hovers between them the whole time with a near-predatory grin on her face, it’s clear that this is intended to be a plural marriage.
Topping off a long weekend of crossing things off of Nicole’s bucket list, Patrick pulls some strings to get her a chance to dance in The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. Though the symptoms of terminal leukemia include chronic fatigue, weakness, and bone and joint pain1, Nicole absolutely kills it. She doesn’t even break a sweat, even after a full day of intense practice. This kid isn’t ready for hospice, she’s about to go to an NFL training camp.
Surprisingly, given the warm bath of sentimental glop we’ve been soaking in up to this point, Nicole doesn’t get a drawn-out deathbed sequence at the end. She just drops dead on the subway the same night as her debut at Lincoln Center, and though I would normally never say this about a child’s death, it doesn’t come a minute too soon. Though in the book Six Weeks is based on Patrick and Charlotte end up marrying for real after Nicole passes away, here he simply returns to his old life in California, somehow winning the election he’s completely ignored since less than a half hour into the movie.
Just four years after the release of Six Weeks, its screenwriter, David Seltzer, would write and direct Lucas, a lovely little comedy-drama that realistically (for the time, at least) depicted its teenage characters as ordinary kids who struggled with complicated emotions. Judging by this, however, I’m not entirely sure Seltzer ever met a child. Other than her weird obsession with her mother’s sex life, Nicole is a Stepford 2.0 creation who never has a cross word or complaint about anything (not even dying) and possesses a Royal Family level of grace and poise. She’s so precocious that you expect there to be a last minute Orphan twist where it’s revealed that she’s actually a 35 year-old Estonian dwarf.
Because Nicole isn’t a real person so much as a plot device to bring two other characters together (and they don’t even stay together!), with a couple of tweaks to the script Six Weeks could have been, if no less corny, then at least less horrifying. Nicole could have been aged up a few years and Charlotte changed to her sister instead of her mother. Alternately, Nicole could have been changed to a boy whose dying wish is to play in the New York Philharmonic and just wants a father instead of a daddy-husband2. But this is what they went with, and now it’s between everyone involved in the making of Six Weeks, and their gods.
I’m not a doctor, but I am capable of looking up information, which is more than anyone associated with Six Weeks bothered doing.
Husbaddy?