Wedlock Blues SHE'S HAVING A BABY
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
You name it: Pampers panic? Tot terror? Baby gloom? But whatever you call it, mark this astonishing fact: for once Hollywood has arrived first on the case, identifying what is obviously a vast and troubling social malaise before Donahue has talked it to death or Congress even thought of throwing money at it.
What the movie folks have noticed is a grim specter haunting all of yuppiedom. No matter how furiously they pedal their Exercycles, no matter how earnestly they chomp through their radicchio or how desperately they try to drown their anxieties in wine coolers, the yups cannot escape this terrible fact: procreation is the enemy of recreation. Not to mention carefree getting and spending. Recently we have seen one mini-hit (Baby Boom) and one maxi-hit (3 Men and a Baby) offering implausibly sentimental reassurances that there is life after surrogate parenthood. Now comes that prolific chronicler of youthful crises, John Hughes, bringing a similar message with She's Having a Baby.
In many ways his movie is the most conventional of the lot. Chance does not place an infant on the suburban doorstep of Jake Briggs (Kevin Bacon). His wife Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern), goaded on by her folks and his, makes him work embarrassingly hard at producing an offspring -- all to help her fulfill her motherly instincts (Jake has a not too hilarious problem with his sperm count). But having been, at best, an ambivalent bridegroom (goodbye novel writing, hello advertising; goodbye sex as sport, hello sex as duty, with Chain Gang for scoring), he has an underdeveloped feeling for fatherhood.
This is not exactly an unheard-of condition. Dialing through the less prosperous cable channels late at night, one is likely to find people like James Stewart and Carole Lombard wrestling with it in black and white, with more charming indirection and a lot less self-pity than the new crowd manages. Part of the problem with She's Having a Baby is the lack of old-fashioned grace in its leading performances. Bacon has yet to mature as a comic actor; he is still just a bouncing boy. It is impossible to take his grownup ambitions, therefore the subject of the movie, seriously enough to laugh at very much. McGovern, by contrast, is all pouts and whines; one could not blame her spouse if he strayed for real instead of in fantasy. Worse, Hughes' satire of suburbia is mostly as soft and comfortable as an old slipper. And his conclusion, in which he tries to work up suspense over a difficult birth, startles only by the blitheness with which he descends into banality.
He has done better. In fact, he does better right here. Occasionally Jake drops without warning into a dream state: a wedding ceremony where he repeats a vow to love, honor and provide credit cards; a Saturday-morning vision of all the power mowers on the block coming together in a Busby Berkeley musical number. These sequences have an attacking spirit and a sheer joy in moviemaking that the rest of the enterprise desperately needs.
Hughes also offers a thought that perhaps everyone taking up this subject ought to bear in mind. Eyeing Jake and Kristy as they wed, a foxy grandpa snaps, "Nobody matures anymore. They stay jackasses all their lives." Anyone canny enough to state that point ought to be able to make a movie that does not spend all its time trying to wriggle and giggle away from it.