Since Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are all beloved classics and National Lampoon’s Vacation and Home Alone are considered to be two of the funniest comedy scripts ever written, there aren’t a lot of John Hughes movies that could be described as “underrated.” But not every Hughes movie was a big hit. In between Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Uncle Buck – two of Hughes’ biggest critical and commercial hits – the director suffered one of the few disappointments of his career with the unceremonious release of She’s Having a Baby. It received mixed reviews from critics and, according to Box Office Mojo, grossed just $16 million. But it deserved a much warmer reception.
While characters like Ferris Bueller and Uncle Buck were plucked straight from Hughes’ active imagination, She’s Having a Baby is a deeply personal story about the filmmaker himself. The movie covers the life of a young couple from their wedding day to the birth of their first child. It’s an honest look at the struggles of long-term relationships, the terror of becoming a parent, the temptations of infidelity, and the transition from starry-eyed youth into mundane adulthood. With a 5.9 score on IMDb and a 41% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, She’s Having a Baby might seem like a movie to skip. But it’s entirely undeserving of those low numbers. She’s Having a Baby is one of the most sincere and heartfelt movies of the 1980s, an era of cinema usually marked by glitzy commercialism.
Kevin Bacon gives one of his best early-career performances as frustrated everyman Jake, while Elizabeth McGovern provides a solid foil as his childhood sweetheart-turned-wife Kristy. Like Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann in This is 40, their romance rings true, but so do their bitter, intense, increasingly frequent arguments. Bacon and McGovern’s electric on-screen chemistry is one of the few aspects of the film to be widely praised by critics. The two leads are backed up by some great supporting players: Holland Taylor plays Jake’s mother, a young Alec Baldwin plays his best friend, and a who’s-who of ‘80s movie mainstays like Edie McClurg and John Ashton appear in minor roles.
It’s impossible not to read She’s Having a Baby as Hughes’ most autobiographical film. There are a lot of similarities between Hughes and his protagonist. Hughes met his wife in high school and got married at a young age. In the end credits of She’s Having a Baby, Hughes’ wife Nancy is credited as the movie’s “inspiration.” Like Jake, Hughes worked as a copywriter at an advertising firm while dreaming of launching a more creative writing career as a storyteller (Jake wants to write novels while Hughes wanted to write movies). Both Jake and Hughes end up turning their insecurities surrounding marriage and impending parenthood into a story called She’s Having a Baby. The final shot of Jake’s manuscript bearing that title seems to be a message from Hughes to the audience telling them they just watched his most personal film to date.
Throughout the movie, Hughes uses cutaway fantasy sequences to show the audience what Jake is going through. In his two-star review, Roger Ebert dismissed these cutaways as “an amazing assortment of gimmicks,” but they’re a great way to visualize emotions. In the opening wedding scene, the priest’s ceremonial speech changes to fit with Jake’s fears and insecurities about getting married: “Wilt thou provide her with credit cards and a four-bedroom, two-half-bath home with central air and professional decorating?” When Jake settles into his office cubicle, the walls literally start closing in. When Kristy tells him she’s secretly taken herself off birth control in the hope of getting pregnant, Jake’s ensuing freakout is visualized as a rocket propelling him through the desert into a dead end.
Contemporary critics were not kind to She’s Having a Baby. Michael Wilmington wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the movie has an “unpleasant edge – seesawing between romance and paranoia.” Gene Siskel wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “Bacon’s character is such a chronic complainer that we wonder why McGovern doesn’t dump him.” But not everyone hated the movie. In An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder, noted Hughes fan Kevin Smith declared She’s Having a Baby to be his favorite Hughes film, and a big influence on his own work.
She’s Having a Baby takes the lovable, bright-eyed high schoolers from Hughes’ beloved teen comedies and puts them up against the harsh realities of life after they leave school. What happens when John Bender and Andie Walsh and Ferris Bueller all grow up and have to find jobs, raise children, and make their marriages work? It might not be as consistently funny as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or strike the balance between rib-tickling and tear-jerking as well as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, but She’s Having a Baby is still an underappreciated gem in Hughes’ filmography.