MOVIE REVIEW

Middle-aged women embrace their inner strippers for a good cause: cancer research.

By Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer

One of the most popular British imports in recent years is what might be called the tea-cozy movie. Brimming with the most twinkly eccentrics this side of the Shire, with stories of tidy emotional uplift and unsullied locales straight from the national tourist board, the tea-cozy movie means to wrap you in warmth from your nose to your toes. English directors such as Mike Leigh may traffic in hot reality, but over here we often prefer our Brits tepid.

The latest tea-cozy movie to travel across the pond is "Calendar Girls," a paper-thin comic distraction about some English women who bared their all in the name of charity. Very loosely based on a true story, the film relates how in 1999 members of the Rylstone Women's Institute, a North Yorkshire chapter of a national club, stripped down to their middle-aged plump and pucker to produce a calendar that would raise proceeds for leukemia research.

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In a country that holds a place of pride for its eccentricities, a calendar featuring 11 nearly naked ladies discreetly obscured behind flower arrangements and a cunningly placed apple press was less outlandish than it might have been in, say, Salt Lake City. The calendar was a hit and soon afterward the Beeb, then Hollywood, came calling.

As written by Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi and directed by Nigel Cole, a veteran of the tea-cozy movie by way of the 2000 trifle "Saving Grace," "Calendar Girls" is closer in texture and consistency to individually wrapped American cheese than good, tangy English cheddar. But even humble plastic-wrapped cheese has its virtues and so does this film, which for its first hour hums along principally by virtue of many, many shots of the verdant Yorkshire Dales and the professional good graces of its cast.

Chief among those graces are Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, two well-matched and criminally underused actresses who as lifelong best friends Chris and Annie tend to make you regret the movie that could have been, even as they felicitously help pass the time. It's Walters' character, Annie, who bears the brunt of the film's drama when her husband, John (John Alderton), is diagnosed with cancer. After the inevitable wiped-away tears, Chris suggests that their chapter of the Women's Institute publish a nude calendar instead of the usual postcard images of the local scenery.

The calendar will honor John, a florist who was fond of saying that the women in the district bloomed late, and stave off the tedium that comes with the club's typical endeavors such as bake-offs and guest lectures on the wonders of broccoli. The women, of course, are scandalized until they start shaking their booties with impish delight, embracing their inner strippers and throwing their sturdy Marks & Spencer unmentionables to the wind. Although they have little to do but grin and bare it, Mirren and Walters are delightful company. Mirren, who appears to enjoy dropping trou as much as fellow Brit Ewan McGregor, gives the story spark, while Walters furnishes its one moment of heart-breaking reality when her character mistakenly believes that her husband is leaving her, though not in the way that she thinks.

The leads are nicely supported by a handful of theater and screen veterans, including Annette Crosbie, Penelope Wilton and a tangy Celia Imrie. The actresses are such pleasant companions that the fact that the movie turns into an advertisement for itself when the characters visit Hollywood — to promote the calendar (and the very story we're watching), launching a shameless interlude larded with clichés — is almost forgivable, but not quite.

'Calendar Girls'

MPAA rating: PG-13, for nudity, some language, and drug-related material

Times guidelines: Some nudity, mild language

Helen Mirren...Chris

Julie Walters...Annie

Linda Bassett...Cora

Annette Crosbie...Jessie

Celia Imrie...Celia

Touchstone Pictures presents a Harbour Pictures production, Released by Touchstone Pictures. Director Nigel Cole. Writers Juliette Towhidi, Tim Firth. Producers Suzanne Mackie, Nick Barton. Director of photography Ashley Rowe. Production designer Martin Childs. Editor Michael Parker. Costume designer Frances Tempest. Music Patrick Doyle.

Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

In limited release.