She's Having a Baby
John Hughes' justifiably forgotten peek at new adulthood
The late writer/ director/ producer John Hughes was born February 18, 1950 in Lansing, Michigan. He’d be celebrating his 75th birthday this month. Video Days kicks off its inaugural month with a retrospective of ten of the filmmaker’s pictures.
SHE’S HAVING A BABY (1988) begins with voiceover narration by Kevin Bacon’s character in which he declares, “I loved her more than anything on the face of the earth” and it never recovers. Dedicated by filmmaker John Hughes to his wife Nancy–as a thank you for her inspiration and support in his own work, more so than an attempt to make a film about her–it would be bad if over-sentimentality were its biggest flaw, but that only scratches the surface. Nothing from its conception to its characters to its end credits sequence works at all.
Written, produced and directed by John Hughes, shooting commenced in September 1986 on the Paramount Pictures lot in Los Angeles while Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) was still in theaters. (Suburban exteriors were shot in Skokie, Illinois, with additional location work at the Field Museum in Chicago). The filmmaker and the studio he was in a two-year deal with set a release of June 1987. Despite having only six weeks between wrapping She’s Having a Baby and starting production on his next picture Planes, Trains and Automobiles in order to get the latter in theaters by Thanksgiving 1987, Hughes completed post-production work and turned in his cut in time to make the summer date. Paramount screened She’s Having a Baby and made the decision to push the release back to February 1988. The spoken reason was a cluttered calendar which would’ve put Hughes in competition with big special effects comedies like The Witches of Eastwick, Innerspace and Spaceballs, as well as two tentpole releases from Paramount that had blockbuster written all over them: Beverly Hills Cop II and The Untouchables.
John Hughes at that time was not a tentpole filmmaker, his most successful films as a director released in February and building ticket sales through word of mouth. What was going unspoken is that Paramount had seen She’s Having a Baby and didn’t think much of it. By the time it reached theaters, not only were reviews negative (Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned two thumbs down) but Baby Boom (1987), the hit Three Men and a Baby (1987) and the Molly Ringwald comedy For Keeps (1988) had all gotten to the market first with baby comedies. In its seventh week of release, Good Morning Vietnam (1987) grossed more than twice what She’s Having a Baby managed in its opening weekend before it disappeared.
In spite of its title, She’s Having a Baby stands apart from those other pictures by not being very baby-driven at all. It’s mostly about a twentysomething marriage and life changes leading up to the delivery of a baby. Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern are well cast, both possessing the range to suggest they weren’t cut out of a J. Press catalog. Alec Baldwin brings the film to a halt in a good way, for what was for all purposes his film debut. He’s playing a stock character–the bachelor buddy–and some of Baldwin’s scenes seem to be missing, but there’s nothing stock about his performance, which is charismatic in its seediness. The cast–which includes James Ray (the CEO from Planes, Trains and Automobiles), Holland Taylor, John Ashton, Edie McClurg (the principal’s secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and Paul Gleason–is fine. The writing is incredibly lazy and the editing unable to resuscitate it.
McGovern isn’t allowed a line of dialogue for the first ten minutes of the picture and as another stock character–the wife–isn’t present as much more than an exotic animal being fostered by Bacon’s character. Even as a story told strictly from the husband’s point of view, it’s missing scenes showing us how much he loves his wife or where they struggle. Instead, other characters tell us this. Editor Alan Heim–who cut Network (1976) and All That Jazz (1979)--was responsible for working with Hughes and the picture is a wreck. In one moment, Bacon’s neighbor emerges from his garage wearing Italian cycling gear, never to appear again or form a friendship with the new guy next door, as if the rest of the cyclist’s scenes were cut.
Rather than an idealistic couple facing a hectic world of in-laws, career, home ownership, neighbors, and family planning, much of She’s Having a Baby reduces Bacon’s character to staring off into the middle distance in deep anxiety. This is an honest reaction, but makes for a boring movie. In an effort to give these routine domestic scenes flavor, Hughes indulges in his main character’s fantasy life, from a minister who issues specific wedding vows to a dream blonde he’s imagined. For someone who’s supposedly writing a novel–another thing characters tell us, but we never see much evidence of ourselves–Bacon’s inner voice and dream life are mundane, not at all like Hughes’ writing up to this point. Then in its closing credits sequence, actors or musicians who Hughes had worked with, or who were working on the Paramount lot, toss out baby names. Filmed over several months, the sequence doesn’t work because almost everyone throws out random names or words that have no context. Ad-libbing why the baby should or shouldn’t be named after them might’ve inspired some good bits, as well as put names to each cameo, all of which go uncredited. Like so much of the movie, longer moments that should’ve been trimmed instead go on and on, while fleeting ones that needed more time to incubate fly by.
Video rental category: Drama
Special interest: The ‘Burbs
You had me at the opening blurb, lol! Funny and wonderfully detailed takedown of a movie I've never seen -- and never plan to, especially now. Wow, even the greats make some duds.