Men have only one thing on their minds. Agreed. But women do
as well. The difference is that what women have on their minds
has greater repercussions. Women want babies and when they
can't have them, they will resort to all sorts of procedures to get
them. In Federico Garcia Lorca's story "Yerma," the title
character kills her husband for his inability to help her out in that
department while in Ben Elton's movie "Maybe Baby," the woman
is the one who takes on most of the hardships for being
presumably inconceivable.
"Maybe Baby" is a light comedy but it is not a fluffy one, one
that you can forget about two minutes after leaving the theater.
Its success can be attributed in part to a clever script by Ben
Elton based on his own novel entitled "Inconceivable," but mostly
by the writer-director's excellent casting. He's put together a
team which bounces dialogue off one another smartly with
particularly amusing performances from character actor Rowan
Atkinson as a gynecologist and Tom Hollander, an English
performer who adopts an uncanny Scottish accent in the role of
an egotistical, over-the-top film director.
"Maybe Baby" features the attractive and charming Joely
Richardson in the role of Lucy Bell, married to Sam (Hugh Laurie-
-considered by the director to be the Tom Hanks or perhaps even
the George Clooney of his native Britain). Sam is a well-paid
scripter who is currently blocked not just in the writing
department. His wife Lucy is in her thirties, desperately wants a
baby, and in a fast, attention-getting opening scene buzzes her
husband on his cell phone to report that she is ovulating and that
he must stop what he's doing to bike right home.
While a considerable part of the film deals with the frustrations
of baby-making--which makes sex more of a mechanical and
anxiety-producing process than one of ecstasy--Elton takes us in
a Pirandellian fashion into the business of making a film about a
couple desperate to make a baby. When Lucy discovers that her
own ideas have been plagiarized by her husband, who has
written the screenplay for the film, she goes ballistic, threatening
their marriage..
On the negative side, Elton throws in hackneyed accounts of
sperm-bank donations, setting up the usual stick figures such as
the hysterically friendly nurse giving instructions to the poor male
who must now convert his main teenage pleasure into a
gruesome laboratory procedure. This is nothing, of course,
compared to what a woman must go through, including a process
of in vitro fertilization presided over by a sadistic doctor (Rowan
Atkinson) who wields metal instruments like a modern
Torquemada and who recites a litany of diseases that his patient
does not have. Ben Elton succeeds in turning a couple's pain
into effective comedy while at the same time refusing to make
light of their anguish.
Copyright © 2001 Harvey Karten
out of 4
