Baby Boom
“Baby Boom,” tells the story of a yuppy who gets the ultimate toy, a cute little baby daughter. At first she doesn’t want to play with it, but after a while the baby grows on her, and even gives her ideas for other toys like a farm house in Vermont, a baby-food company and a handsome veterinarian.
This could have been made as satire, I suppose, but the movie makers aren’t quite sure. They see too much humor in the yuppy’s life style (Linda Ellerbee has fun with Keaton’s work hours in an opening voice-over), but they love that baby so much that finally “Baby Boom” turns into one of those movies where everyone falls in love The yuppie is played by Diane Keaton, who more or less created this category when she made “Annie Hall.”
For most of this film she is a hard-driving Manhattan business executive who works hard and takes no hostages. She has got six figures coming and going; there is not an apartment available to her between 72nd Street and Battery Park City that does not call itself luxury; she has got friends and influence at Sesame Street; she has got her own line of wooden dolls; she has got everything except time.
Then two of Keaton’s long-lost relatives die in England, and they leave her their pride ‘n’ joy a 10-month old girl named Elizabeth (played by twins Kristina and Michelle Kennedy). There is no question about raising the kid herself: After all just days before this happened to her Keaton had an ad partnership dangled under her nose.
So she copes with the kid as best she can for a few days (feeding it gourmet pasta at one point and checking it in a restaurant cloak room during lunch). Then fully intending never to see this kid again she takes it off to be adopted and finds she just can’t part with this sweet little girl.
It is right then that the movie changes tone. Up until Keaton’s decision to keep the child, “Baby Boom” has been a hard-edged satire (the dialogue between Keaton and the hat-check attendant is an example, as Keaton thrusts the squalling infant across the counter and promises “a big big tip”). But after this turning point “Baby Boom” goes from being a satire into an escapist fantasy, in which everything turns out OK just because people are nice.
The film never confronts its heroine with any of the real messiness of the world poverty, illness, catastrophe and after she quits her job it supplies her with enough money in the bank to buy a country spread in Vermont for herself and Elizabeth. And when that money runs out she starts a gourmet baby-food company that’s worth millions within a few months.
There is more to this movie than I’ve told you; there’s no question about it being better than most movies about cute babies, but then almost anything would be. What makes “Baby Boom” work what makes it more than just candy for two hours- -is mainly Diane Keaton’s ability to make us believe both sides of her nature at once. She plays J.C.Wiatt as a tough cookie on wheels–a woman so ruthlessly ambitious that when she discovers she loves this baby it means we’d better watch our step too or else.
But Miss Keaton also lets us see something else inside Wiatt: A deep serious love for that child.
Diane Keaton plays J.C.Wyatt
Certainly, all this is too good to be true; nonetheless, that’s why I loved it. “Baby Boom” doesn’t show us the real world. It is a fantasy about mothers, babies, and sweetness and light, with enough wicked comedy to give it an edge. Producer Nancy Meyers and director Charles Shyer wrote the screenplay which possesses some of the same literate charm as their previous film “Irreconcilable Differences,” and some of the same sly observation of a generation at war with itself between selfishness and good nature.
However, there are two major problems I have found in this movie: firstly when Keaton character leaves her job in business world to become mom she didn’t sacrifice anything because she becomes millionaire due to keeping baby instead; secondly such things rarely happen but they definitely should have been portrayed that way! “Baby Boom” represents like any other Frank Capra’s films darkness always gives place for dawn.
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