Rent-a-Womb

By Mark Goodman

The Baby Maker begins as if it should have been titled Regeneration Gap and scripted by Timothy Leary. It unabashedly bills itself as a "social comedy of today's world." As the audience absorbs that modest claim, the film opens on Tad (Scott Glenn), mustachioed and lank-haired, wailing with a guitar in his dingy L.A. beach pad. His chick Tish (Barbara Hershey) is off to check out an uptight middle-class couple whose triplex in Brentwood is without child. Seems Mrs. Triplex has had a hysterectomy, and Tish is to audition for a possible rent-a-womb job with Mr. Triplex. There is heavy bread in the offing if she actually reproduces. "If we start right away, we can have a Scorpio," Tish brightly suggests. Meanwhile, Tad, the stoned-age Neanderthal, mutters "beautiful" and "out of sight" with numbing repetition.

For all that, the viewer who can wade through an implausible situation, a clutch of cardboard dropouts and painful patches of dialogue will discover a film that is curiously sensitive and affecting. Screenwriter James Bridges (The Appaloosa, The Forbin Project) makes his debut here as a director; his sympathetic approach to the principal characters and an admirable sense of directorial pace eventually overcome his stereotypes and his tin ear for conversation. Even so, Bridges could not remotely have succeeded without engaging performances from Miss Hershey (the willful teen queen from Last Summer) and Sam Groom and Collin Wilcox-Horne as Jay and Suzanne Wilcox, the childless couple. The film's strength lies in the delicate interaction of the trio as they move from their far-out decision through the pleasure and pains of childbirth.

Stepmotherhood. Groom and Miss Hershey set an intelligent tone for the ensuing nine months with the initial love scene that aims neither for low laughs nor clinical cynicism. Instead, Tish and Jay treat each other with a conspiratorial tenderness that deepens throughout her pregnancy. Suzanne, meanwhile, keeps a reasonably tight check on her jealous impulses and awaits, with as much dignity as possible, the qualified glories of stepmotherhood.

The Baby Maker's saving grace is that Bridges never resorts to cheap, boudoir-farce gimcracks where fundamental relationships are concerned. Jay does not run off with Tish, nor is Tish transformed into a Supermother who demands the baby at birth. However outlandish the situation's premise, it proceeds and climaxes with such natural logic that the film becomes unconventional Hollywood. The trio's art oddly imitates life and elevates The Baby Maker from garish absurdity to touching humanity.

o Mark Goodman

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