Baby Fat

Directed by James Tucker

Written by Joshua Nelson

90 Minutes Runtime

MPAA Rating: Unrated, probably PG for mild sexual references

USA Release September 20, 2004

Rating (Out of 5 stars): * 1/2

Not so much a movie as a collection of video comedy skits, “Baby Fat” is totally home grown fare from director James Tucker and Writer/Producedr Joshua Nelson.  The movie was shot entirely in various people’s houses in Staten Island by Director of Photography Ross Jordan and made use of the natural environment by choosing various friends and neighbors as “actors.”  Apparently shot in video, the filming style is, well, video.  In local parlance, it is what it is.

“Baby Fat” explores the lighter side of decisions facing young married couples about to raise a family in today’s threatening world of drugs and violence.  Namely, how does a woman get pregnant without getting fat?  The answer is, of course, a surrogate mother, but finding the right mom for Mr. Right is not always easy, especially given the wacky advice of family and friends surrounding the leads, Gina and Joey.

Gina is played by Martene Fallacaro.  “A hairdresser that always dreamed of being an actress, (according to the official press package), Martene picked up an issue of Backstage on a whim and won the part of Gina.”  Unfortunately, Gina’s lack of acting training is a big part of what makes “Baby Fat” come off more as a demonstration reading than a film.  The story line is light, to say the least, and Gina adds nothing to it but a genuine flavor of growing up Italian in New York City.  If her role and performance lack depth, in all fairness to Fallocaro, they are not supposed to.  The whole movie is about a lack of direction caused by topsy turvey moral leadership in today’s social scene.  If this movie gets her more work, more power to her.

Gina’s husband, Joey, is played by Joshua Nelson, who also produced the movie, sent me the press package, and probably does about twenty other things at the same time.  In other words, he’s leaning how to be an independent film maker.  Joey is a well mannered young man who tries gamely (too gamely) to handle his turbulent wife in the midst of her crises ranging from nail color to hair style.  Joey’s style is more suited to TV sit-coms than movies and he appears to be taking a lot of his cues from, perhaps, TV’s “Friends.”  Although “Friends” is a very successful series, it isn’t a film, and the cast and crew of “Baby Fat” should learn the difference.  This is an early try for Joshua, as well as the rest, but comes off more as practice than the real thing.

One of the differences between a movie and a TV series is that the movie has a lot less time to develop charactors.  If Fallocaro is acting like Jennifer Aniston in “Friends,” she has to do it fast, because she doesn’t have fifty episodes to make her point.  If she is going to be air-headed, she has to be air-headed intensely.  And she wasn’t that.  The movie showed what she could accomplish given time, but that isn’t what people pay to see.  Similarly, Joey plays the even-handed, but dumb, husband.  But being intensely even-handed is very difficult, even if TV straight men have done it for years.  On TV, it takes twenty episodes for the audience to get the idea.  In a movie theatre, you simply don’t have that long.

Given these short comings, the performances of the cast and the efforts of the crew are authentic and have the energy of youth that will not be denied.  Rachel Soll played a very good Jo Ann, Gina’s best friend, and the film would have done well to have included more lines for her.  She has a more under-stated style, but more depth, than the nominal lead in the film.  The plot would have benefitted by including her charactor more, as the best friend of both of the leads.  Perhaps making her the surrogate mom in some sort of comical mix-up leading to the movie’s happy ending.  Uncle Bobby, played by Vince Mazza, has the best line in the movie when he provides sage advice to Joey ending with the qualification, “...But you don’t know that yet, beacsue you’re young, and stupid.”  Forgive me if I misquoted the line, but it was funny and genuine and reflected the feeling that the cast and crew were searching for, but never found consistently.

If not quite a movie, the film did bring to mind some of the great TV performacnes of the past, and perhaps these could lead the way for future practice.  The nod to Luci and Dezi Arnaz of the old “I Love Lucy” series was undeniable.  To the extent that the story can bring back that feeling it will be a success.  Unfortunately, the target audience for this movie was not even a bulge in their mothers’ designer jeans when “Lucy” was playing.  As this reviewer recalls, that series was shot during the entire real life pregnacy and delivery of Dezi, Jr.  If Soll has a more modern “Saturday Night Live” feeling about her, Fallacaro could be a knockout Lucy if she practiced and gave it a chance.  She has to work on losing the sophistication and being more open if she is going to make it as a comic.  The skill to lose it is what counts, and she never really does that.

By the same token, if Nelson is going to be a straight man, he would do well to study Dezi Arnaz and practice going from super-sophisticated to a quivering pile of drool when faced with his foil’s right-brained thinking.  George Allan of the legendary Burns and Allan team is probably the world champion at this.  In this movie Joey is simply too reasonable too much of the time.  A great comedic straight man has got to put himself on a piller in order to fall off it, and he can’t do that when he is evenhanded.  He has to be Archie Bunker or Jackie Gleason if he is going to take that major fall that brings down the house.

Consistent with the feel of the movie as a demo tape, a major part of the film time is taken up by “auditions” for the surrogate mother.  This is only an issue because the segment is so lengthly and adds absolutely nothing to the plot of the movie.  If this material could be replaced with material that developed the charactors; set up Joey for the fall and introduced Gina into some kind of hopeless snafu, the time would be much bertter spent.  As it is, the parade of charactors, who are not funny (mainly because the audience doesn’t know them), only starts the viewer off to dreamland and may make them miss what could be a nice ending.

My thanks to the cast and crew of “Baby Fat” for a genuine and, sometimes, funny, performance.  This reviewer genuinely hopes they will do it again.  Only better.