The Baby Dance

Stockard Channing stars in yet another tele-movie. Her performance is very good as usual and she deservedly picked up a Golden Globe nomination. Laura Dern gives a fine performance as a pregnant woman who wants to give her baby up for adoption. The movie shows the struggles of these two women and there is a twist at the end which did not surprise me.

Didn't care for this one, way too slow and the subject was uninteresting. Why do folks want to adopt, especially from a pack of mobile home misfits? One look at these losers and I would have been hanging an exit. This trash couldn't afford a whiff of fresh air but they always had their beer and ciggies. Not a bad production, I just found all the people involved very irritating.

I agree with missygoldstein@aol.com about what kind of parents they would have made. I mean this speaks a lot about what kind of parents they would have made. What if they would have had a child of their own and later on it had health issues, would they abandoned it? Or what if the child they would have naturally was born with problems, would they give it away? What if this baby they were going to adopt that they decided not to in the end was healthy and later on developed a life altering condition? If you consider a child yours, it's not just yours when it's healthy, it's yours when it's sick and if they thought they would get a pure healthy baby when they mom smoked and didn't take her vitamins they were crazy. Also did they think they could adopt, love and raise any child and never face any health or medical issues? I guess it was suppose to be healthy and stay healthy until it went off to college then any health concerns were then the kids problem. It's like "Well, we raised you healthy, now your not so you're on your own."

As a woman who lost her child to adoption 35 years ago, and who works voluntarily along with others for reform of adoption laws in Ireland, I found this film (shown on TV here last night) simply wonderful. I know that many previous message posters have commented on the "ugh ending", but I think that the whole point of the film was the carefully observed visual statements of all the characters, that the story continues, and will never end as long as they all live. Obviously, from my perspective, Laura Dern's face haunts me, as does Richard(Linklater's?)as they both sit in their clapped-out truck outside the hospital. I transpose their baby's face onto theirs. My ideal next scene if the film continued would see them bring their daughter home to join her brothers and sister. After all, was it ever suggested that they weren't loving parents? I'm surprised that other commentators on the film haven't stated the obvious - the golden kernel of The Baby Dance is the insightful screenplay and convincing script. I will be recommending this film to everyone I know.

"Baby Dance" is a fine addition to the onslaught of scrupulous films about birth rights and the dynamics involved when nature is not left to its own design, or is in some fashion revealed prematurely. In "Twilight of the Golds" it was homosexuality, and in "Gattaca" it was genetic predisposition, but Baby Dance is a bit more of a human drama with very real situations. I highly recommend this movie as a thought-provoking, intensely personal look at infertility and adoption. You may not like what you see, but what you see is real and genuine.