by Andrew Clarke

Published at 11:39, Thursday, 02 October 2008

IN today’s culture of the overnight celebrity, film and television makers alike have been quick to jump on the “fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” line and play it for dramatic effect.

You can’t seem to switch on the television these days without a Big Brother Ruined My Life documentary or Ricky Gervais’ character in Extras bemoaning the celebrity lifestyle.

So it’s true to say that A Perfect Day, starring the always watchable Rob Lowe, isn’t the most original film ever made, but on the other hand, it isn’t too often we hear that the ‘victim’ who finds his new-found fame too much to handle is, of all things, a novelist.

But that’s exactly the situation faced by Lowe’s character, Robert Harlan, in this newly-released DVD.

The Robert Harlan we meet in the outset of the film is a devoted father and loving husband in a picture perfect family.

When Harlan finds some time on his hands after being made redundant from his job, he returns to writing a novel he had begun years earlier.

Supported by his wife, he finishes the book which gets picked up by a small-time agent who has enough faith in Harlan and the book, entitled A Perfect Day, to fight for it to be published.

And published it is and it isn’t long before the book captures the nation’s imagination and shoots straight to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list.

As the sales of the novel increase, so does the size of Harlan’s ego and what starts out as an exciting adventure quickly becomes a media frenzy which turns the author into a heartless money-grabber, forsaking his family in the process.

One minute Harlan is kicking himself for letting his daughter’s music recital slip his mind, and the next he is turning on his agent and skipping a family funeral in favour of a book signing.

It takes a wise and mysterious stranger, played by Christopher Lloyd, to try to bring Harlan back down to earth.

A Perfect Day is far from the most ground-breaking film you will ever see, nor does it have anything particularly original to say about the trappings of fame.

But it is a perfectly enjoyable family story of success, greed and ultimately redemption in its own right.

Published by http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk