Baby Done: Kiwi Pregnancy Comedy Cradles the Genre’s Clichés

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-

Into the niche but abundantly populated genre of pregnancy comedies (Juno, Nine Months, Knocked Up, Baby Mama, and so on) comes the New Zealand comedy Baby Done.

Produced by Taika Waititi, the director of Thor: Ragnorok and JoJo Rabbit, the film serves as a launching pad for Kiwi comedian/actress Rose Matafeo. The half-Samoan, half-European, twenty-something comic is a rising star in observational comedy. She was a 2018 winner of the best comedy prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and has already had a successful stand-up special, Rose Matafeo: Horn Dog, on HBO Max last year.

Her co-star here, as the baby-daddy Tim, is English actor Matthew Lewis, best-known as Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films. The whole package — written by Sarah Henderson and directed by her husband Curtis Vowell — has a casual, episodic vibe, mixing sardonic banter and broad physical comedy.

The opening scenes establish the couple as a pair of enthusiastic arborists, high in the treetops. Zoe has a poor opinion of baby-making: At some friends’ gender-reveal party, she says dismissively, “Marriage, house, baby, done!”

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

When she discovers she’s pregnant, Zoe tries to keep it from her Tim and goes into quasi-pathological denial. She’s terrified and determined not to “become a dick” (i.e. a boring parent) and she makes Tim join her in composing a bucket-list of pre-baby adventures. These include a tree-climbing competition in Canada, bungee jumping, sex and drugs. When Tim discovers Zoe is already pregnant, he tries to put a stop to her reckless itinerary.

Because pregnancy comedies typically involve a beginning, an awkward middle, and happy end, there are few ways to make the conventional seem unconventional. Along with an excess of indie-pop songs on the soundtrack, Baby Done fills its running time with a couple of narrative digressions.

In one scene, Zoe, practicing being parental, impersonates the mother of one of her college-age co-workers. More goofily inspired are the scenes where she has a short-lived flirtation with a smooth-talking “pregaphile” fetishist:

“It’s very hard to find a beautiful single woman with a bonus in her belly” he explains.

Generously, she allows him to pat her baby bump.

A few more such haphazard encounters might have made Baby Done feel like more like a fresh exploration rather than labouring to rework a formula.

Baby Done. Directed by Curtis Vowell and written by Sarah Henderson. Starring Rose Matafeo and Matthew Lewis. Available on video on demand and digital platforms starting January 22.