Baby Boom

Baby Boom touches on more intriguing ideas about the way we live today than most other movies out there; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be aware that those ideas are even floating around.

If it didn’t rely on its gimmick (the baby) so much, Baby Boom might even have been an Unmarried Woman for the 1980s. It falls well short of that, though it is one of the first mainstream films to deal explicitly with the dilemma of women who want to have careers and be mothers at the same time.

Diane Keaton plays a savvy, hard­-driving executive who proudly calls herself “The Tiger Lady,” an all­ business whirlwind. She shares her Manhattan townhouse with an equally career-minded yuppie (Harold Ramis).

The gimmick hits when Keaton’s cousin dies and sends her a surprise inheritance: a tot. Keaton openly admits that she’s going to put the child up for adoption: “I’m not good with living things.”

But after a few days tending the kid, she of course turns to mush, and baby Elizabeth stays (the decision is iced when the prospective adoptive parents turn out to be American Gothic types from Duluth, who want to rename the girl Fern). This cuts into her work time, and eventually Keaton loses her high-paying job. In confusion, she chucks it all, buys a house in Vermont, and determines to make it on her own. This is also a disaster, as the house retaliates in malevolent ways, and Keaton is left to wonder at her failure to have it all.

The New York section relies on baby jokes – how Keaton flubs up the act of diapering, for instance – and seems too pat in its insistence on her inability to reconcile career with family. The Vermont half is more interesting, I think, even though it gears up into fantasy toward the end, as Keaton meets a hunky veterinarian (Sam Shepard) and makes a fortune in gourmet baby food. The issues on hand here are potentially provocative ones. Mostly they’re skirted by writer-producer Nancy Meyers and writer-director Charles Shyer.

In many ways Diane Keaton is glorious here, working her brand of deft magic. But I wonder if she’s really the most appropriate casting for this role. The way Keaton’s neuroses ripple under her every changing expression doesn’t make her the most believably with-it organization woman; the film might’ve had more of a curve on it had the role been played by a steelier actress, one who could make the slide into confusion and panic a more striking character change.

First published in The Herald, October 10, 1987

Big hit – seems odd that co-writer Nancy Meyers had to wait another decade to direct her first film. The movie certainly bolstered Keaton’s career, even though I think my point about her less-than-ideal casting has something to it. You’ll have to forgive me for talking about the “dilemma of women” – everybody was talking about this at the time, I swear.