Director: Kirk Jones
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Matthew Morrison, Elizabeth Banks, Jennifer Lopez, and Rodigro Santoro.
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 110 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2012

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Rating notes: Sexual references and coarse language

This American comedy film is based loosely on the best-selling book of the same name, published in 1984, as a pregnancy guide for expectant mothers, and co-written by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel. The movie tells the story of five couples, whose lives are turned upside down by the challenges of anticipated parenthood.

The film looks at love, impending parenthood, and pregnancy in very different ways, and through the changing lives of the five couples. The couples’ experiences are enter-twined. Celebrities, Jules (Cameron Diaz) and Evan (Matthew Morrison), find it difficult to accommodate their lives to the demands of pregnancy. Wendy (Elizabeth Banks), who has been a fierce advocate of parenthood, comes to think that her advice may need to be revised. Holly (Jennifer Lopez), who is unable to have a baby, travels to Ethiopia to adopt a child, and her husband, Alex (Rodrigo Santoro), joins a local support group of fathers to help him cope. The lifestyles of all the couples are changed dramatically by the prospect of parenthood. It is an event, which intimately involves them all, and it turns their world upside-down in unexpected ways.

Things start to go wrong before the babies are due. Some see their pregnancy as interfering with their preferred lifestyle, some are fearful about what lies ahead, while others clearly love the notion of being a parent. Some try to grapple with the thought of a baby they perhaps don’t want, and the film spends time on possible negative outcomes of pregnancy, that include nausea, incontinence, mis-carriage, and premature labor. Having a baby sounded a good idea, but some of the would-be mothers and fathers are not so sure, while others have no doubts.

After the babies are born, everything turns out all right. Relationships get back on track again, and the film concludes by depicting a new-born baby as a loving extension of each couple’s romantic commitment to each other, and to becoming a parent.

The film fluctuates between showing the joy and pain of what happens when one is pregnant, and it conveys male and female stereotypes superficially through pedestrian scripting. Its focusing on the potential for unhappiness in the name of comedy makes the movie a little subversive. There are some genuinely funny scenes that typically characterise comedies of this kind, and they raise a smile, but the movie’s resolution for the couples is a long way from the projected image of harmony and balance in family life that the film tries ultimately to project. A pregnant Jules unintentionally captures the spirit of the film in her distracted, public talk on birth at the end of the movie: “when it is all over, you forget the whole thing”.

This is a film that uses situational comedy and crude language to make its points in sentimental fashion. The hopes for giving birth and becoming a parent are not clear-cut in the movie, and its laughing at all the things that can go wrong along the way gives the film a problematic twist.

Entertaining though it may be, this is not a movie for would-be parents, despite the fact that the film has a polished look, and a cast of actors, who work hard to give pregnancy a comic turn.