The Baby Maker

The Baby Maker

Within the most recent edition of the Chicago Seed (almost no one working for the Seed has a last name, except for its attorney), there is an incredibly harsh review of “The Baby Maker” by Penny, which is also one of my favorite reviews. After Penny gets done with “The Baby Maker” it can be seen as nothing more than a stronghold of middle class values, male chauvinism, political naivete and phony hipness.

One strategy that Penny uses in her critique is the deadpan plot synopsis. This is particularly effective because it seems objective. But you actually can get pretty subjective in a plot synopsis by choosing very carefully what you tell and don’t tell; and you also have to take on an air of knowingness about it.

I bring up Penny’s review first because I enjoyed reading it so much; secondly because her method really works on “The Baby Maker.” A movie about a middle-class couple hiring a hippie chick to have their baby because the wife is sterile? Come off it!

“And yet I think ‘The Baby Maker’ may appeal to many viewers,” as she says herself toward the end of her article, “because ultimately it’s civilized, and funny and brilliantly acted.” People are being so compulsively with it these days that they won’t go see movies they know they’d like just because they’re afraid they ought not to be seen at such and such a movie.

And people are being so compulsively with-it these days that they won’t let themselves react emotionally to scenes like the natural childbirth in The Baby Maker. It would be unhip. Well after all that 10 or 12 minutes! That was as beautiful, as transcendently humanistic, as anything I’ve seen in a movie for years.

Like so many current movies, “The Baby Maker” exists more in individual scenes than as a whole. There are bad lapses of tone, as when the girl with the paint throws it on her former boyfriend, and as when the wife slips her wedding ring onto the girl’s finger before they make the baby. (That second scene is especially crummy.)

And yet against that you can balance a scene where people are picketing against war toys, and you think for a moment the scene has collapsed into banality, and then it surprises you by switching in tone from grimness to goofiness. Or again: The childbirth scene! Both in the movie and at our screening there were tears: I know because I saw them; so did others. And these were tears of joy.

This next one may really surprise some people: It’s my guess that we have to take “The Baby Maker” as a comedy of manners. The husband (Sam Groom) is middle class; his wife (Collin Wilcox-Horne) is middle class; but part of what makes this funny is that Penny plays one middle class person off another that sort of thing. The girl notes that they’ve got all the Frank Sinatra albums. “Yes,” says Sam, “but we’ve got all the Beatle albums too.”

Well now let me think about it Of course I mean if you stop to consider it or whatever but anyway later he tells her not to worry because she’ll still have all the Dylan albums yeah well um quiet irony ain’t what she used to be alright

I clearly favor “The Baby Maker” more than I think a lot of people will. But let me tell you, it’s not a bad movie; in fact, it might be good if you don’t like it. And if you do like it, if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for a while, this film could really touch you. Yeah, the ad campaign is vulgar all right.

Yeah, maybe the wife seems even more neurotic than her character requires her to be. But one glance at the story line of “The Baby Maker” might indicate what kind of taste mistakes it may have made. It could’ve been terrible; instead, it’s pretty good.

Watch The Baby Maker For Free On Gomovies.