BRINGING UP ‘BABY’ : Diane Keaton Plays Annie Hall in an Apron for New Film

The suspicion grows--all right, my suspicion grows--that Diane Keaton’s greatest performance will turn out to have been Diane Keaton. It is not that she has created a public Diane Keaton vastly different from the private Diane Keaton. But it does seem at times that she has, by will and by skill, created a clone of herself, specifically charged with guarding what the private Keaton wishes to keep private.

The public Keaton has taken Annie Hall as a role model: fluttery, vulnerable, almost unbearably adorable. She is not dumb, this Keaton-Hall; far from it. But she projects a kind of artless naivete that suggests a new girl in town, trying to conceal her panic at being in a strange and swift environment.

It is beguiling, as Woody Allen knew when he made “Annie Hall.” It is also excellently calculated to keep hard, or personal, questions at arm’s length.

The private Keaton is, you have to guess, not radically different but only, well, private. Also serious, tough-minded, creatively ambitious, romantic, self-aware, idiosyncratic, concerned and compassionate and, above all, determined to keep her private self private, without making a big Garboesque thing of it.

Not to push the notion too far, but the private, passionate, unfluttery and serious Keaton was perhaps revealed, or glimpsed anyway, in the wonderfully dimensional performance she gave in “Reds” and in the the strenuous emotional assignments she undertook in “Shoot the Moon” and “Mrs. Soffel.” This side of Keaton also made the outspoken and, some thought, outrageous documentary called “Heaven,” and has just done a music video with Belinda Carlisle, currently in rotation on MTV.

Although she says she did not think of it in those terms when she agreed to do the movie, but only liked the role and the writing, Keaton may now have done her most accessible, commercial, mass-audience performance in “Baby Boom,” which opens here Wednesday and in which she plays a hard-driving careerist who is suddenly handed an enchanting, just-orphaned infant to raise.

Written by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer (“Private Benjamin” and “Irreconcilable Differences”) and directed by Shyer, “Baby Boom” is a resolutely old-fashioned though updated romantic comedy, with echoes of the Hawks of the madcap caperings and the Capra of the American Dream realized. But now it is Keaton instead of Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or James Stewart who is having to change life styles in midstream, amid pratfalls and reconsiderations of what matters .

The updating lies partly in the notion that hearth and career may be different but are not irreconcilable, especially if you have a viable idea. This Keaton, comedic but also mature, sexy, beautiful and smart, draws on several past Keatons.

The rumbles are good but Keaton (being overtly ignored and covertly studied at lunch in the Cafe des Artistes) says: “Let me tell you--I’ve been through this many times. I always hear good things, so I don’t trust anybody’s responses at all.”

The baby in the film--actually identical twins named Michelle and Kristina--are gorgeous, even as babies go. “ Utterly seductive,” Keaton says. “Give me a break . They just never do anything that’s a lie. They just are what they are. They’re perfect. That’s fine for me. Not so fine for the director. He’s got to get certain things. I didn’t care if I never got ‘em done. I guess their way of working is similar to mine. They can’t do anything right twice.”

Somewhat to Keaton’s own astonishment, the videocassette rights to her documentary “Heaven” have been bought and the video will be available shortly. “You’ll get a better idea of my folly,” she says, with a certain asperity. “It did well at the Cannes festival and in Europe and Canada. But it did lousy here. I hit ‘em on the head a little bit much. The audiences really didn’t like it, it was clear.”

She had seen religious films about heaven and thought the visual realizations were, in her word, absurd--the visual imagination run amok. She intermingled a series of quick documentary interviews with film clips from Hollywood movies. “Tons and tons and tons of clips; it took forever.”

The reviews, some of them, were hair-raising. “People were irritated by the fact that the people I included were . . . unusual. But people who led normal lives had nothing interesting to say. Why should they? They have no time for morbid speculation.”

The idea of heaven is, she says, partly a response to fears of dying. So she asked her subjects about their own fears of death, intercutting footages of various unpleasant ways of dying.

Yet Keaton has no doubt that there is a longing for belief of some sort. “It’s hard to accept everything without some reason-you think, you hope. Mostly you hope because you can’t think too much about it.”

By a small coincidence, possibly a large one, her music video is of Belinda Carlisle singing “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” photographed partly at Magic Mountain in two exhausting 18-hour days after a lengthy period of preproduction.

“When I first saw the title, I said, ‘Oh, no-no-no-NO, I can’t deal with this; who’d want to know?”’

But the music video experience is the chance to be both writer and director. “It’s like doing a silent film. It’s all playback and you can talk while she’s singing. It’s also like doing a commercial, but with much more freedom. You storyboard it and you cast it like a movie.” It was a lovely experience. “She’s a scorch,” Keaton says of Carlisle, using a favorite new word.

Keaton had earlier gone at still photography with the same intensity with which she has tackled film making. She admired the work of Weegee and Diane Arbus, but has done more studio than street shooting: color work with large-format cameras, rooms, still lifes. “Easier for me than to confront people. I couldn’t do that no matter what had happened to me in my life” (even, that is, if there were no problem for her trying to be the anonymous onlooker seeking the exact instant).

She keeps busy--for a reason, she says in her attractively self-deprecating way. “I’m not unhappy, but I’m not euphoric. Who is? But I can’t stand being left with my own thoughts. I’m tormented if I’m left to my own devices. Thoughts and fantasies.

“I was talking to a writer friend who’s just back from a week in the country. All by himself, working. He loves it. He just sits there and sees where his mind takes him. What a wonderful thing not to be somebody whose thinking gets bad when you’re not putting your mind to some use other than thinking about yourself.”

Keaton has no doubt that, as an actress, she and the movies were made for each other. “I’d always rather do a movie than two hours on stage night after night. I always felt on stage that I was being seduced by the audience, doing things for the audience and not for myself. Just lost it, I think. Doesn’t say much for my character, does it?

“I’ve been lucky because a lot of people I work with have been friendly to the fact that I don’t like to do it the same way twice. I like to try different things. Sometimes it’s not so easy for the camera operator. Those marks, yes?”

“Baby Boom” has a special poignancy for Keaton. We chatted once five years ago, when she was 36, and she remarked that her biological clock was ticking along inexorably but that none of the gents she knew was of a parental mind.

She was then thinking of doing a film called “Modern Bride,” about a woman wanting to be married and a mother. She is now glad she didn’t do it. “The theme (of “Baby Boom”) is more important than just being married, or not.” The theme would be the reconciliation of motherhood and career, and the possible joys of both.

Now Keaton is 41. She is reported to be seeing Al Pacino, although when asked about this, the public, or fluttery, Diane Keaton says “Oh, gosh!” as if either the question or the answer, or both, are probably preposterous. It goes unanswered.

Either way, it is a late hour on the biological clock. “Life is full of trade-offs,” Diane Keaton says, “and you have to accept that you can’t have everything.”