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She's Having a Baby
Retrospectives
- November 2003
USA, 1988. Written and directed by John Hughes.
Photographed by Don Peterman. Edited by Alan Heim. Music by Stewart Copeland.
Released by Paramount. 101 minutes.
Starring Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth McGovern, Alec
Baldwin, Isabel Lorca, William Windom, Cathryn Damon, Holland Taylor, James
Ray, Dennis Dugan, Nancy Lenehan.
Mr. Edwards used to tell us the story about the
guy who went browsing in the junk shop. I kinda remember how it went. He's
looking around, he sees a piano and he falls in love. It's beautifully crafted,
sleek and note-perfect, with wonderful ivory keys. The shopkeeper tells him
he can have it for free, if he takes everything in the place. There are tacky
little trinkets, bits of old randomness and weird objects of art. But the
guy thinks what the hey -- he'll keep all that stuff in boxes, and put the
piano on show.
The customer gets home. He puts the piano in his
hallway. The boxes go in the attic. A couple of months pass, and he remembers
something up there that wasn't all that bad. He finds somewhere to put it;
it suits the place okay. The years go by, and he does this more and more.
By the time he's an old man, everything from the boxes is out somewhere in
the house. And when you figure the story out, Mr. Edwards said, you'll have
realised something about life.
The maxims are everywhere: You don't know what
you've got till it's gone. Life is what happens to you while you're busy
making other plans. We tell ourselves we're going to start living in the
now -- starting from tomorrow. "She's Having a Baby" is a movie
about a guy who realises he's getting older, he's not moving forward in the
way he thought he would, and it's happening faster than he ever imagined.
That makes it a movie about life, which is a force that whispers to all of
us sooner or later, and tells us it's not like that, it's like
this.
His name is Jake Briggs and he is played by Kevin
Bacon. He wants to be a novelist, but he gets married young. "Will I be happy?"
he asks his best friend Davis, a smooth no-strings success chaser played
by Alec Baldwin. "Yeah, you'll be happy. You just won't know it, that's all."
The bride is Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern); she was high school sweethearts
with Jake, and like a lot of women, her strength is in putting up with her
man's self-absorption while her goal is to settle down, be comfortable and
feel the love of a family.
He won't settle. He quits grad school because
it refuses to teach him anything -- "College is like high school with ashtrays."
He gets a job writing ad copy and feels like it's about to swallow him whole.
He can't believe his in-laws are pressuring the couple to have kids. He panics
after moving into suburbia, where the women live for baking and the guys
talk about gardening and let their bellies grow. The movie is a comedy about
the terrified visions that can appear in a young man's head; it moves forward
in fantasy sequences, like when Bacon imagines himself burning a manuscript
for firewood, getting blown off a cliff like a Looney Tunes character, seeing
the neighbours mow their lawns like something out of a Busby Berkeley musical
or finding Kristy's dad at the bottom of the bed, wearing a flashlight helmet
and shouting instructions.
He can't step back and sort it all out. By the
time Kristy starts talking about quitting the pill, he still feels like he's
too young -- "I'd drifted into a marriage, stumbled into a career and backed
into fatherhood." He can't appreciate what he's got, because it's not what
he thought he wanted. The movie builds to him realising where he's at, what
his responsibilities are and why he should be thankful.
There are surreal flights of fancy and silly jokes.
(They even use that gag about the expectant father driving off to the maternity
wing without the mother, before realising and driving back. It's a testament
to the sincerity in the eyes of Bacon and McGovern that moments like this
actually work.) In between that stuff, there are scenes where the couple
put things on the table and discuss their emotions. He stresses about family
and career. She tries to comfort him. He doesn't want to grow up. She's ready
to handle it. The months drift into years and they fall ass-backwards into
becoming more wise and mature, and the filmmaking moves with the flow of
a medley, tied together by Bacon's voice-over and a collection of 80s pop
music.
Few filmmakers can make a picture with those
techniques without making it seem like an empty TV-commercial style montage
or a jumble of uneven tones. John Hughes knew how -- the wild comedy and
the lifestyle drama moments could sit side by side because they're both valid
approaches on the same running theme, which is how simple and old dilemmas
seem a lot more exaggerated or serious to the people they're happening to.
The montages don't fall into the trap of showing a bunch of big events in
quick succession; they exist to tenderly observe, to meditate on images like
the painting of a house, the exchange of loving looks, the curves on a pregnant
woman's tummy. It helps if you have an affinity for the music; if you find
eternal poetry in the voice of Kate Bush, adore the yearning of Everything
But the Girl, appreciate the warm glow in the Bryan Ferry cover of "Crazy
Love".
Hughes made 80s classics, most of them high school
movies that had loyal followings but aren't yet old enough to be obvious
and secure on the altars of those in the critical mainstream. "Weird Science"
is one of the most nonsensical, ridiculous masterpieces I've ever seen. "The
Breakfast Club", about a bunch of kids on Saturday detention, is the kind
of hang-out movie where the characters become your friends, and you care
for their insecure little hearts. "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" gave Matthew
Broderick a career-defining performance as a scoundrel who reminds us how
satisfying it can be to show up authority figures and get away with goofing
off from your routine. "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" was Hughes's best
film, one of those comedies about two guys grudgingly growing to like each
other, which achieved the status of a masterpiece through the performances
of Steve Martin and John Candy, and the love the camera shows for the images
of America's roadsides.
"She's Having a Baby" didn't do that well with
the press or the box office, and now I think it's more or less forgotten.
It should have been the movie where Hughes got Oscar nominations; the Academy
weren't going to award his comedies, but here is where he showed he could
branch out and grow up. I have a soft spot for movies about the passage of
time; it's just a poignant and mysterious thing, and everyone goes through
it. This film is up there with "Terms of Endearment" and "Driving Miss Daisy";
I'm baffled by its non-existent reputation, when everyone I show it to thinks
it's terrific. Hughes hasn't directed anything since 1991, and now writes
crappy kiddie farces like "Flubber". Maybe he doesn't realise how sweetly
he communicated life after teens. Maybe he should realise he could do a good
job yet again, before the years really do pass by and there is no other
chance.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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