(1987)
2.5
Derek Armstrong
At its release, Baby Boom was seen as a timely spotlight on the dilemma facing women as they began breaking the glass ceiling, whether to channel all their resources toward career success or compromise their upward mobility by having children. The issue and its execution clearly interested audiences, turning the film into a minor hit and giving it an ongoing life as a television sitcom. In retrospect, however, it's a simplistic film done in broad comic strokes. The tiger-like persona Diane Keaton assumes in the office quickly crumbles into scatty panic when she's faced with adversity, most notably (but with the fewest laughs) when she buys a lemon of a house in Vermont and must confront its myriad problems while trying to stay afloat financially. Other scenes similarly stretch credibility. For example, you'd imagine that two MBAs (Keaton and Harold Ramis, her career-driven love interest) could figure out something better than linguine to feed their new infant. The point is that their careers have dulled them into domestic ineptitude, but it plays like slapstick that denigrates their apparent intelligence. Baby Boom is an intermittently interesting, ultimately disappointing embodiment of a typical Hollywood agenda -- namely, to repudiate the callous big business world in favor of folksy small-town pluckiness. Especially with such dusty comic devices as Keaton interviewing a spectrum of terribly inappropriate nanny applicants, exaggeration rules the day, rather than insight.
Baby Boom on AllMovie
Baby Boom (1987)
