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MAYBE BABY Send This Review to a Friend
The compulsive attempts of a couple to have a baby is the basis for this British romantic comedy, which works best when concentrating on laughs and human foibles and less successfully when trying to deliver emotional involvement. Fortunately the film written and directed by Ben Elton has Joely Richardson and Hugh Laurie in the leads, with a battery of good character performers to add further life.
They should be the ideal couple leading an ideal life. Lucy, played by the very attractive, charismatic Richardson, works as a talent agent. Her husband Sam, portrayed in a good-humored, laid back style by the interesting looking Laurie, commissions material for BBC television. But they are fixated on Lucy getting pregnant, but nothing is happening and sex becomes work, as they take every test and try every scientific gambit they can. Lucy wisecracks about the indignities she suffers, dramatized in one hilarious scene in which Rowan Atkinson does a turn as the medical expert, wielding assorted instruments, making tasteless remarks and comically humiliating Lucy as she lies with her legs apart.
More humor is provided by Tom Hollander as the egocentric Scottish film and television director Ewan Proclaimer. He's zany and he's funny. Emma Thompson has a blip of a role as Druscilla, a hippie-type who fleetingly appears and gives some useless advice. Adrian Lester, an actor increasingly in the public eye, plays Sam's pal George and Lucy is deeply worried when George and his wife fear they may lose their baby as a result of illness. James Purefoy plays seductive actor Carl Phipps, who is a client of Lucy's and comes on to her with words of love and the intent to get her into bed, and she is very, very vulnerable.
The dramatic twist kicks in when Sam decides to write a film based on his and Lucy's experience, but doesn't tell her because she would abhor the idea of exposing their personal lives. Worse, he steals material to get the woman's angle from her diary, which he secretly reads. It's a recipe for marital disaster. It is also a plot thickener that plunges the film into the complex situation of Sam's doing the film secretly, and since the material is covering private ground, making it sort of a film within a film. You know all hell will break loose when he is unmasked.
"Maybe Baby" has a bright veneer, with an effort to make London look hip and very contemporary. The relationship between Lucy and Sam is depicted with tenderness and spirit but after a while all the concentration on becoming pregnant and the turn toward seriousness leaves the film a mixture, a pleasant one, but not nearly as satisfying as if the comedy had been turned on full steam, as in the moments when the BBC is twitted and the torturous things some will endure to have a child are mocked. On the sound track the song "Maybe Baby" is sung by Paul McCartney. A USA Films release.
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