Screwball in Vermont: “Baby Boom”

A 1980s screwball romantic comedy that’s retained some of the hallmarks of the genre’s heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, “Baby Boom”’s delightful chronicle of a high-powered New York businesswoman who inherits a baby from a long-estranged cousin and decides to escape the rat race in order to start over in idyllic small-town Vermont. It gave me a much-needed escape during the pandemic as well. This film first introduced actress Diane Keaton to two of her most important future creative collaborators in writers Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer (who also directed) and made the Oscar-winning actress a box office sensation in 1987. Steve Martin was such a “Baby Boom” fan that he contacted Meyers and Shyer about working with him, which resulted in the ’90s “Father of the Bride” franchise co-starring Keaton. In the film trivia flipside of that reaction, another important pair of tickets to see “Baby Boom” in its theatrical release were sold to Joel and Ethan Coen, who, plagued with writer’s block while scripting “Miller’s Crossing,” went to see the film to clear their heads, and their less-than-enthusiastic response to the picture inspired them to write “Barton Fink.” I’m of the mind that you can appreciate both “Baby Boom” and the Coen-verse, but as “Miller’s Crossing” is one of my favorites of their pictures, that fact has always amused me.

My earliest memories of the film are fuzzy because I was in kindergarten then, but I fondly recall renting “Baby Boom” on video with my mom when it was new, around the same time that 1987’s other thematically similar gender-flipped “Three Men and a Baby” was released. However, it wasn’t until I saw it again in adulthood, when I was roughly the same age as Keaton’s main character J.C. Wiatt, that “Baby Boom” became not only one of my favorite comfort movies but also something that—nearly forty years later—still deftly hints at timeless hard truths about the work-family-life balance of women in their 30s and 40s.

Given its dual settings of New York and Vermont and a narrative focused on a highly successful career woman who finds herself unexpectedly embracing a life of domesticity, “Baby Boom” is an ideal picture to program as the second half of a double feature with director Peter Godfrey’s marvelous “Christmas in Connecticut,” starring Barbara Stanwyck. But an even deeper cut to pair this one with is director Garson Kanin’s terrific “Bachelor Mother,” starring Ginger Rogers, which has found increasing popularity over the past few decades thanks to faithful airings on Turner Classic Movies. From a feminist perspective, “Bachelor Mother” is even more daring than “Connecticut” in the way it addresses the double standards of whether women can really have it all and what’s expected of them professionally. Much like in “Baby Boom,” Rogers’ blue-collar employee finds herself the unexpected full-time caregiver of a baby through equally dubious yet hilarious logic. Still, it’s intriguing to see that two films made nearly fifty years apart both grapple with the same questions regarding the desire for a family life while wanting to retain one’s agency, independence, and professional worth.

Paying overt homage to the classic Hollywood era and those earlier films about women’s changing roles in American society, “Baby Boom” opens with a dated Capraesque voice-over (by Linda Ellerbee) about the “phenomenon of our time” of working women who “moved out of the pink ghetto and intro the executive suite.” Thankfully, it quickly vanishes into the background to let the character-driven dialogue written by Meyers and Shyer take center stage instead.

One of our most verbal actresses, from her background in Woody Allen movies to her mile-a-minute performance in Warren Beatty’s “Reds”, Diane Keaton credits the specificity of Nancy Meyers in particular to knowing how to find the funny by showcasing Keaton’s equally impressive gifts as a physical comedienne. To quote a descriptive line from Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail,” as a performer, Diane Keaton “makes coffee nervous,” and “Baby Boom” makes the most out of her skills and quirky sensibilities. From the anxious way that her Ivy League–educated heroine’s legs rattle furniture when she’s excited by the prospect of becoming a partner at the management consultant firm to her willingness to cancel dinner plans with her equally career-focused investment banker beau (Harold Ramis) without hesitation, Keaton’s J.C. Wiatt is a kinetic woman on the rise.

Having earned the respect of men in all ranks of her industry, including her mentor (Sam Wanamaker) as well as the ambitious climber she’s recruited (James Spader), when J.C. suddenly finds herself named the guardian of her estranged distant cousin’s baby girl. After a few sitcom-lite scenes featuring a kitchen full of tossed linguine and broken wire-rim glasses, J.C.’s first instinct is to put the child up for adoption. Yet following a long night where she nurses the tyke with a cold, J.C. finds herself unwilling to leave the child in the care of a religious couple from Duluth who have alarming ideas about the worth of a daughter vs. a son and decides she’s going to raise Elizabeth (played by twins Michelle and Kristina Kennedy) herself. Of course, all women know that motherhood comes with a high price tag, and for J.C. that cost is twofold. As the men in her orbit show just how little value they place on anything other than the bottom line and how eagerly they’ll ice her out, she loses her boyfriend and her spot on the partner track in quick succession. Crying behind sunglasses while carrying a box of her belongings outside, she trades the concrete jungle of New York for a life in the country with Elizabeth in Vermont and tries not to look back.

A yuppie fantasy in which the stakes are never all that serious for J.C., even when the two-hundred-year-old house initially turns into something of a money pit, before long she finds a new career making organic baby food and love with Sam Shepard’s dreamy veterinarian Dr. Jeff Cooper. Paired with Shepard multiple times in her career, the earnestly well-matched, hilarious chemistry that the pair have in this film is so pitch-perfect that it makes us overlook the fact that nothing about the timeline of the second half of “Baby Boom”—in which she apparently creates a multimillion-dollar baby food empire in a matter of months—makes sense. Yet, when you have the two of them squaring off in a flurry of banter for a surprising first kiss over her flat tire by the side of the road, who’s thinking about logic?

Shyer and Meyer’s film, like J.C. Wiatt and everyone watching “Baby Boom” now in a deeply frightening 2025, wants to have it all. And even though we know the balance isn’t entirely successful, since, as Wanamaker amusingly tells Keaton, “something’s gotta give,” for 110 minutes we’re more than happy just to escape a world of cold, fair-weather businessmen and live in this oasis of autumn leaves, sycamores, adorable babies, self-created business success, supportive veterinarians in sweaters who adore complicated women, and screwball in Vermont.