Directed by Kirk Jones. Starring Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Chace Crawford, Brooklyn Decker, Ben Falcone, Anna Kendrick, Dennis Quaid, Chris Rock, Rodrigo Santoro 12A cert, general release, 110 min
This low-rent baby shower is all about the dads, writes TARA BRADY
THE BECHDEL Test, like Maxwell’s equations or Euler’s formula, is one of those scientific slide rules noted for its simplicity and elegance. The tripartite law, inspired by Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip, lists a basic, softball feminist criteria: (1) a movie must have two (named) women, (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man.
How is it, then, that What to Expect When You’re Expecting – a big-screen adaptation of the indispensible pregnancy guide – only just scrapes a Bechdel pass?
Don’t scrunch up your eyes when you push unless you want to burst a blood vessel. Massage a vegetable- based oil – almond is good – into your lady-parts as often as you can during the final countdown. Walk through the exhaustion: it’s totally worth it. These and other useful bits of information are nowhere to be found in Kirk Nanny McPhee Jones’s sub-Sandler dad comedy.
Murkoff and Mazel’s clear, if condescending, bible of gestation may address such common and uncommon difficulties as stretch marks across tattoos and protein adjustments for vegans. But Hollywood’s version shifts the focus away from less involved, less relevant parties such as the mother and baby.
Forget everything you thought you knew about pregnancy. Forget everything you knew about Bechdel. Forget everything you thought you knew about What to Expect. This glossy, barn-broad new film starring pretty much everyone, concerns itself with the real victims of reproduction: the emasculated stroller dads.
You have to feel for Anna Kendrick, who attempts to bring some pathos and, well, acting, to this low-rent baby shower. Sure, there’s a neat dichotomy between flatulent, moody, big-as-a-house Elizabeth Banks and her younger, radiant, taut-with-twins-inside stepmother-in-law, Brooklyn Decker.
This subplot, however, is swiftly tossed aside in favour of dads bemoaning their lot. Chris Rock is the smart-mouthed one; Thomas Lennon is the uncool one; Rodrigo Santoro is the one with second thoughts. Together they meet in the park to use the word “vagina” as often as possible. For, as Mr Rock explains, once the baby comes out of there, you don’t ever think of it as anything else. Bleuch!
Is it medically possible for the soul to get colic? We didn’t think so until now.
From the get-go, it’s a barmy, scattershot idea for a movie. But it didn’t have to be that way. Smart people, notably Tina Fey, have managed to turn self-help and sociology into cinema. Mean Girls and Think Like a Man, last month’s US box office champ, both started life as paperback manuals from the shelf, just below Chicken Soup for the Soul and Seven Habits.
To be fair, How to Expect is, superficially at least, a lot more fun than He’s Just Not That Into You or – shudder – Eat Pray Love. Of course, one will have to overlook the unrealistic, nanosecond-long onscreen labours, unfeasibly tidy bumps and a troublingly conservative view of what a family (married, rich, straight) is supposed to look like.
And as for the completely sanitised, anaesthetised, bloodless depiction of pregnancy itself? Abort now.
“I can’t wait to meet my baby!” coos the tagline. By the end we can’t wait to meet our maker.
As with all contemporary pregnancy comedies, J-Lo is in the house.
