Photo Gallery
Diane Keaton stars as J.C. Wyatt, a high-powered ad executive who has just been asked to become a partner at her swanky New York agency. J.C. is known as the 'Tiger Lady,' a smart and successful woman who can not only play with the boys, but can beat them every time. She lives in a spacious penthouse with an equally business-oriented companion (Harold Ramis) and is perfectly content with her cold, rich existence.
The turn-on-a-hinge plot propeller: J.C. awakens one late night to a phone call notifying her that a long-lost uncle has passed away, leaving her an unidentified inheritance. The next day she discovers the inheritance is a six-month-old baby girl. The logistics of this situation are as far-fetched as any over-the-top comedy premise: One must check their logic at the door and think specifically in terms of the emotional plight of the characters, and J.C.'s plight is funny and engaging. J.C. first opts to put the baby up for adoption, but after caring for and bonding with young Elizabeth, she simply can't give her up. Just like that, J.C. is no longer 'Tiger Lady,' she is 'Working Mother.'
Keaton is fabulous in roles like this, where she plays the nervous, infectiously-spastic independent woman who has needs, particularly when they are written with equal parts gushy sweetness and savage wit by Nancy Meyers. Watching Keaton toss the poor baby around while attempting to seriously discuss her advertising work with high-powered corporations in the film's early scenes is undeniably funny. Meyers' script, with director (and then-husband) Charles Shyer, breaks no real screenwriting ground, but is filled with acutely-realized nuggets of human comedy. Sure, we get the typical can't-get-the-diaper-on gags, but the light touch of Meyers and Shyer's writing combined with Keaton's pitch-perfect performance sells every last drop of cute humor.
The film's depiction of the female-in-a-man's-world office dynamic is played with relative simplicity, featuring several curmudgeonly old bosses who espouse deliberately antiquated views on women in the workplace, which of course makes us root for the heroine even harder. But in retrospect, for an '80s movie to even attempt to topple societal constructions of gender is a laudable feat. The expected 'Working Mom Can't Do It All' cliché is played to its full emotional tilt here, as J.C. falls behind at work and eventually falls out of favor with her superiors. Those superiors are as cinematically evil as a PG-rated comedy will allow, and their treatment of J.C. in light of her circumstances gets the audience as riled up as any old-school studio gloss manipulation can.
Eventually J.C. leaves her hectic NYC life for a slower, calmer existence in snowy small-town Vermont, where she discovers that a working mom can indeed have it all -- including the perfect New England man, played here by Sam Shepard at his most down-home and handsome. That neat conclusion, that fairy-tale notion that every last piece of the puzzle will fall into perfect position, is the heart of Baby Boom's style. It is audience-friendly, warm-hearted, fuzzy happiness with a soft-focus bow on top. There are lots of cute jokes, many convenient plot developments, and endless simplistic characterizations. But the material reaches high for a female protagonist even by today's standards, let alone 1987's. Meyers was on the cutting edge of the independent-women-who-need-love-but-also-can-succeed-on-their-own movement in modern cinema, and Baby Boom was there at the beginning of an era.
