MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Babyfever’: Henry Jaglom on the Motherhood Mania

It’s been awhile now since jokesters regarded Alan Alda as the poster boy--or whipping boy--for extreme male sensitivity. Though director Henry Jaglom probably isn’t mainstream enough to ever rate a “Tonight Show” gag, he seems to have taken up the Alda memorial mantle, releasing movies you could justifiably call “women’s pictures,” albeit not the kind Douglas Sirk used to make.

Given his apparent desire to surround himself with actresses and actresses alone, and spill their innermost hopes and fears, you figure Jaglom’s either extraordinarily attuned to the estrogen cycle of the Zeitgeist or just afflicted with Venus envy.

Having eavesdropped already on one of the two great gender-specific fixations of our time, the thinness obsession, here he gets around to the other, the desire to be with child. “Babyfever” does for delayed procreation what his earlier art-house success, “Eating,” did for food-related frustrations. This movie, too, is amazingly unwavering in single-minded devotion to its subject, and after almost two hours of baby chat served up with Jaglom’s usual deliberate technical crudity, childless women won’t be the only ones feeling their clocks ticking. But when it comes to being a compleatist, he does deliver.

The movie is principally a very long, very philosophic Malibu baby shower, which some inevitably feel ambivalent about attending, not having realized their own dreams of motherhood. Chief among the reluctant is Victoria Foyt, established in a brief setup as expectant of being expectant; she’s supposed to get her results back by the end of the afternoon, which lends the laconic party a little suspense.

Gorgeous and driven, Foyt has no fewer than two guys who say they’d like to sire her children, but the one who may have impregnated her is an overly safe, responsible “suit” type (Matt Salinger), and the one she feels some real passion for is, of course, a fly-by-night rapscallion (Eric Roberts). Few of her contemporaries are blessed with even that considerable a choice of sperm donors. Among the other showerers who show up sans child, there’s much bitterness over childlessness, and commitment-phobic men come in for a lot of lashing in this extended ladies’ room.

Make no mistake, this is the date movie from hell.

But for viewers less immediately inclined toward conception anxiety, “Babyfever” begets a definite fascination, remarkable in its comprehensive documentary aspects, at least. (He’s created a great time capsule, if not necessarily a great time.) Jaglom is, as always, big on verite and improvisation; with such a large cast milling about the airy, oceanside house, he’s managed to cover just about every conceivable baby base, with sentiments ranging from banal self-interest to self-conscious belly laughs, and a lot of very real, undeniably affecting poignancy in-between.

But Jaglom’s success as an unofficial documentarian here undercuts his intentions as a dramatist. For much of the movie’s mid-section, Foyt’s concerns get set aside while Jaglom crams in as many dozens of different talking heads as possible; even Foyt’s fairly involving character seems to come out of a Jaglom-esque void where women aren’t given any outside social context that doesn’t relate directly to the matter at hand--i.e., this time, their uteruses.

Despite her character’s short-shrift, Foyt (credited with co-writing the scripted part of the film with Jaglom, and making her starring debut here) is flat-out terrific. She’s so radiant that you can’t help thinking during the movie what a crime it’d be if those results didn’t turn out positive.

It wouldn’t be giving too much away to suggest that Jaglom finds a noncommittal way to have his cake and eat it too at the end, first with a slightly downbeat yet exultantly liberated climax, then an absurdly cheerful, non sequitur coda in which Foyt has found an unnamed, unseen great guy (presumably Jaglom, her real-life husband) and blown up like a balloon. It’s diapers ex machina.

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes frank talk about sex and especially pregnancy. * ‘Babyfever’

Victoria Foyt: Gena

Matt Salinger: James

Dinah Lenney: Roz

Eric Roberts: Anthony

Frances Fisher: Rosie

A Rainbow presentation of a Jagtoria production. Director Henry Jaglom. Producer Judith Wolinsky. Screenplay Jaglom, Foyt. Photography Hanania Baer. Editor Jaglom. Sound Sunny Meyer. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.