The Baby Dance

Baby Dance is riveting. It is an emotional roller coaster to watch. Outstanding performances by Laura Dern, Stockard Channing, Peter Riegert, and Richard Luckman head up a fine cast.It examines the difficult decisions faced when a mother is to give up her child to strangers. In this case, a rich couple from California cannot have children, so they place an ad for adoption. It is answered by a young couple in Louisiana who are poor and have decided to part with their child at birth. This is one of TVs finest efforts and can be rented as a movie made for TV. Don't miss it!

"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.

The world was Stockard Channing's oyster when she thrilled us with Rizzo in "Grease", but since then her orbit has been somewhat lower. She's carved out a nice niche in the upper echelons of made-for-TV melodramas, and nearly every year she gets nominated for some award or other. It was the Golden Globes this year, for this performance. She seems particularly adept at playing women in tug-of-love battles over children (see also `An Unexpected Family'), and here she and Peter Riegert are the anguished but wealthy childless couple who throw money at poverty-stricken trailer-trash mother-of-four Laura Dern, hardly happy about the impending appearance of kidling number five; Dern and abusive hubby Richard Lineback are only too happy to sell the superfluous sprog. So far, so usual, but the twist (unlike most TV movies, there is a twist) comes when complications at the birth raises the possibility of brain damage. Will the yuppie couple pay for damaged goods? Will love of child conquer love of money for the trailer trash?

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."

I continue to be impressed with Laura Dern's range. i've been a fan since Enightened, but I wasn't totally aware of how much range she has, how warm she can make her characters, how natural despite not necessarily playing them subtlety. She's an amazing actress, and this is actually one of her finest performances that I've seen. It's full of great pathos, great expressions that sort of tell you everything you need to know while not saying anything explicitly, Her character here could've come across as a caricature for most of the running time with a lesser actress, but Dern instantly makes her relatable and likable, and sort of empathetic towards her. That's a truly great mark.