She's Having a Baby

She’s Having a Baby has become something of an overlooked entry in the John Hughes oeuvre. It arrived on the heels of the director’s hit comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which itself marked a notable transition from the iconic teen comedies that put him on the map, but was not particularly well-received critically or commercially. It’s not entirely difficult to see why. The film has a loose, almost indifferent structure, and frequently feels like it’s fishing for a laugh. Supporting characters drift into the story, then drift out again just as casually. Hughes is much too seasoned a comedic writer not to land some solid, offhand zingers (one character, awkwardly receiving condolences over her mother’s passing, snorts “Yeah… you and Neiman Marcus”)… but one can’t shake the sense that he’s laboring to extract the humor from material he assumed would be far more fertile. 

As Jake and Kristy Briggs, the young couple struggling to navigate marriage and adulthood, Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern (in her apple-cheeked days long before Downton Abbey) don’t have particularly strong chemistry… and yet, paradoxically, their relationship has a distinct ring of authenticity. Somehow you find yourself believing - often intensely - in the two of them as a couple, precisely because Hughes’s depiction strips away the usual sheen of storybook artifice. Their marital issues frankly border on the mundane. Jake fails to finish grad school, and ends up in advertising for lack of a better option. Neither side of the family is particularly supportive of the union (with Holland Taylor playing Jake’s mother, sarcastic barbs are both anticipated and expected). Infidelity is flirted with, but never seriously on the table. But every time it feels as if the film’s narrative dimensions have become flabby, or Hughes’s dramatic grip on the picture has gone slack, a moment of genuine insight or bracing wit manages to pull the threads taut again.  

The titular event doesn’t actually occur until the final quarter of the film, with the climactic delivery room drama (scored to Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work,” which is no “Running Up That Hill,” but an effective choice nonetheless) indulging in the sort of tonal whiplash that feels common to movies of the 80s. Hughes doesn’t have all that much to say about parenthood anyway - beyond the obvious, that a child signifies the need to finally grow up, even if it’s done kicking and screaming. Of course, the movie basically tips its hand in the first five minutes when Jake expresses ambivalence over his impending nuptials, to which his best man Davis (Alec Baldwin) comments “You’ll be happy. You just won’t know it.” For a lot of people, that’s probably the most truthful line Hughes ever wrote.