Baby, It’s You

Baby, It’s You

Rosanna Arquette has a thing about her. She’s a natural-born actress; not in the sense that she was talented from birth, though maybe she was, but because when she appears on screen there is nothing artificial or unnatural about her performance: it feels like I am looking through the script and direction into the life of her character.

That’s what I thought while watching “Baby, It’s You,” an intermittently very good and occasionally maddeningly uneven movie which is carried by Miss Arquette with unfailing energy from beginning to end. Even when the scenes themselves aren’t working, her character does; we come to know this young woman she plays, Jill Rosen an unusually engaging high school student who becomes a terrified college freshman.

It is a film by John Sayles, who makes movies out of carefully observed details from ordinary lives. His first film was “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” about some 35-ish survivors of the Sixties. Earlier this year he gave us “Lianna,” about a 35-ish faculty wife who discovers, with fear and trembling anticipation, that she prefers women.

Now here is Jill Rosen; a high school student from the Sixties who might well grow up to be any one of those people in Sayles’ first two films.

Jill is smart and pretty especially when she smiles but there are other things besides looks involved here. She also has style. There’s something about her which lets you know she hears you even when it seems as though she doesn’t; something which shows that even though she may be angry at you right now, part of her cares for you. This is clearly a person whose love should mean quite a lot to anybody lucky enough to have it and certainly that would appear to be the opinion of Vincent Spano as The Sheik, a semi-greaser consumed by his desire to become exactly like Frank Sinatra.

The Sheik and, come to think of it, a lot of this movie seem to belong more in the Fifties than the Sixties but never mind. This kid is well dressed, appears supremely self-confident and seems not to care that he sticks out like a sore thumb with his Sinatra wardrobe and his brazen ways. He’s a rebel with ambitions. Jill loves him; but when she leaves Trenton, N.J., and enters the uncertain world of Sarah Lawrence College, The Sheik doesn’t fit in.

“Baby, It’s You” does two things with this material. First, it remembers it accurately right down to the annoying mannerisms of preppy college boys who have much too much unearned self-confidence. Then it uses it as a meditation on growing up which involves learning to listen to your heart as well as your ambitions. The movie is at its best during its high school segments; the opening hour is wonderful. Then comes the exasperating part, when this film which has been so surefooted loses its way among the college scenes and lets us wonder occasionally just what we’re supposed to be thinking.

In the good parts and in the ones which disappoints Rosanna Arquette is equally good. I have seen her only twice before this: as Gary Gilmore’s girlfriend in TV’s “The Executioner’s Song,” and as a bimbo without a bra in “Off the Wall.”

But they are, after all, two entirely different people one story is about Nicole Baker; the other concerns Cheryl Downey and both of these characters she plays with refreshing naturalness. It shows how easily can a young actress’ career be ruined by movies that have no faith left in anything at all, like “Off the Wall.”

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