Birthpsychology at the Movies
The Baby Dance
I. Reviewed by Marcy Axness.
Showtime's 1998 feature movie "The Baby Dance" is a brilliant, shattering portrayal of some of the harshest truths about adoption in America. The stunning, cautionary tale involves two couples from vastly different worlds, driven together by brutal social and medical circumstances. Writer/director Jane Anderson enlists the unrelenting heat of the Louisiana setting to help weave a taut, trapped sensibility through her story of these four souls and their doomed, symbiotic struggle. Anderson's gift here is that she vividly illustrates each individual's contribution to the ultimate tragedy without pointing fingers or making anyone The Villain.The story opens with a wordless contrasting of the experiences of the two couples: Wanda LeFauve (Laura Dern), visibly pregnant, cigarette in hand, loses once again at her weekly poker game, while her unemployed husband Al (Richard Lineback) stops by the convenience store for a daiquiri slush; Rachel and Richard Luckman (Stockard Channing and Peter Riegert) subject themselves to the sterilized indignities and invasions suffered by the infertile. As dialogue begins, Wanda complains to her mother that she really has to get her tubes tied. An attorney chipperly explains the rewards of adoption to the Luckmans. Richard--who explains that while Rachel believes in nurture, he believes in nature--isn't quite as optimistic as his wife, and wonders aloud about the "kind of women who answer baby ads."
Al and Wanda, living in squalor in Shreveport, already have four children who can't fit into their cramped trailer (so they're staying at Wanda's mother's), and Wanda has made the decision that they cannot keep this fifth child, their second daughter. As Rachel Luckman ventures out of her privileged, air-conditioned L.A. life into this alien universe, I think of Blanche du Bois cringing her way through Stanley and Stella's primitive, sweat-stained world. We witness a series of discomfiting scenes: Rachel frequently inquiring with righteous concern about Wanda taking her prenatal vitamins and improving her diet, the vulgar implication being that Rachel wants only the best for her baby; Rachel gazing awestruck upon the LeFauve's willowy 12-year-old daughter doing cartwheels on the lawn, and Wanda, proud and sad, saying "Well, now you know what the girls look like." Al, crushed of spirit and already bitter about the loss of his second daughter, expresses his grief as black humor enabling us to glimpse clearly for a moment the hideousness of this particular social "remedy": "Well hey, why don't we give Patricia to Rachel, too? We'll make it a two-for-one deal."
Full of good intentions, Rachel seeks to comfort Wanda about the adoption plan:
"Wanda, I hope you know that this baby is going to get a lot of love."
"Oh I can give the baby love, I know I can do that. But you know, kids want things, they see the other kids with a brand new bike and stuff, and they wonder why they can't have that too. That's what we have the problem with."
In one of the movie's crisis scenes, Al slaps Wanda, after which she reassures Rachel with her personal take on pre- and perinatal development: "It's not genetic or nothing, it's just how he was raised. Doesn't matter where a baby comes from. You can make 'em turn out however you want to. A brand new baby's too excited to be alive to care what was goin' on when it was sittin' inside its Mama's belly."
Wanda is sadly mistaken, as APPPAH members know. What goes on while this particular baby is in her mama's belly are things that can contribute to poor outcomes: chronic stress, poor diet, fears related to pregnancy, and--one of the most insidious, in my opinion--the emotional detachment of a mother who has already consigned her child to the custody of others. Here, then, is one of the brutal ironies of adoption, set in bold relief by the devastating final sequence of "The Baby Dance." While the pregnant woman still has physical custody of the baby inside her body and a hopeful adoptive mother is dreaming of that child as her own, the baby remains a special kind of orphan, a soul in limbo, longing for connection, waiting to be claimed.
II. A Dance, Indeed
By Michael Trout
In the 1998 film “The Baby Dance” (Showtime Entertainment, 91 minutes, available on video), Stockard Channing (as the adoptive-mother-to-be) and Laura Dern (as the expectant birth-mother) slowly twist and turn in their struggle for the baby that one has, and the other wants.
There are clichés abundant, of course. The adoptive mother is well-to-do, from Los Angeles and, naturally, in the “movie business.” The birth mother already has a passel of kids, a strong southern accent and a husband who likes to sleep late, and they live in the world’s grimiest trailer park. Birthdad cannot seem to find work, and we are given to understand that the ONLY reason they have decided to relinquish this baby is that they are poor. This must mean that dad is the villain, and he works hard to play the part: shirtless throughout much of the film, we are a little hard-pressed to like him.
But the film forces us into the struggle, too. The birthfamily uses their prenatal care money (sent by check from Los Angeles, the proverbial land of milk and honey) to fix the truck and bail grandma out of jail. But we find ourselves commiserating: what else were they to do? The infertility of the adoptive family is never full explained (thankfully), but we are permitted to know just how much it has torn each of them apart.
In a bar one night, when the two worlds collide, the very-pregnant (and smoking, of course) expectant mom asks the prospective adoptive about her many miscarriages. As they chat, however, it becomes the birthmom who holds the sorrow, while the aching-but-defended adoptive mom tries to tell a joke about dying babies. Meanwhile, at the other end of the bar, stand the two dads--formerly stalking each other with rage and suspicion, but now, each lubricated, talking about infertility and loss.
From this reviewer’s perspective, the culmination of the film is the wrestling match that breaks out between the two men in the birthing room at the hospital. We are no longer able to dismiss the birthfather, as we witness his emergence as a man wracked with pain about his impending loss. And the adoptive father, furious at the escalating demands of the birthfather, finally slumps to the floor, defeated, saying to his attorney (who has been trying to break up the fight), and anyone else who is listening: “He can do the one thing I cannot. He can make life. Give him whatever he wants.”
The ending (which I will not give away) is sorrowful and unpredictable. No problems are solved for us. Have we, for 90 minutes, been voyeurs? Have we learned anything about the hurt and the struggle of parents--including men, for goodness sake--in these circumstances? And what was the baby--who watched the whole film, just as we did, but from the inside--learning?