Another hammer blow hits hard, Diane Keaton (1946-2025) has left us - and somehow, the world feels less rhythmically odd, less nervously human, less alive with the possibility of contradiction. She was the one who made hesitation glamorous, who turned confusion into wit, who wore vulnerability like a perfectly cut suit. If Hollywood ever had a saint that melds weirdness and chicness, she was it.
It is a peculiar pleasure in ruminating an actor’s career not as a chronology of hits but as a private mixtape of moods. The selected foursome, a B-side miscellany compared to her more well-known and successful works, traces the contours of a performer refusing repetition. Keaton is often remembered for her comic cadence and the asymmetrical little-girl-with-big-hat persona, but these films remind you that she was always a shape-shifter - a woman who could tilt into danger, cradle spinsterhood like an honest chore, do physical comedy with a calculator, and find courage to embrace her mortality.
LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR is a dizzying report from the edge, a cold, moral fable dressed as a night out in 1970s New York. Keaton’s Theresa Dunn is a teacher for the deaf by day - a fact the film uses cleverly, not as a gimmick, but as metaphor: she is expert at reading gestures and patient enough to teach deaf kids, and yet she moves into public life seeking noise, risk, sex, and a kind of self-definition that a classroom doesn’t supply. The classroom scenes matter more than you remember: the soft, meticulous way Theresa signs, watches faces, and tends children is set against her bar-room self like two different languages the same body speaks. Those early sequences anchor the character and make the late-night experiments that follow feel less like exhibitionism and more like a frantic attempt at escape. The bars, the drugs, the casual relationships - the film stages them as experiments in identity rather than as mere titillation. Keaton’s achievement is to make Theresa’s appetites ambiguous and therefore human; you feel her intellect under the bravado, and you feel the emptiness, the anguish below the intellect.
One of the film's most defining traits - and most divisive ones - is its editing: that feverish, almost panicky rhythm that keeps cutting between Theresa’s fractured identities. We’re thrown from fluorescent classrooms to smoke-choked clubs, from the intimacy of confession to the chaos of her own impulses - often within seconds, which feels like Theresa’s nervous system: overstimulated, compulsive, desperate for sensation and terrified of stillness. What’s especially striking is how this technique builds unease rather than excitement. Many disco-era films cut rapidly to energize; here, it disorients, as if it has a moral vertigo.
Keaton, for her part, uses this jittery rhythm as fuel. Her performance becomes syncopated - she times her glances, gestures, and hesitations to the film’s unstable pacing, a pause after being touched a certain way, a flinch at a remark that sounds like judgment, the way she tucks the scar on her back away from sight without ever turning the camera into a confessional. In quieter moments - like the scene where she tells her lover she doesn’t believe in love - the editing slows, and we suddenly see the stillness she’s been avoiding. Then the tempo quickens again, slicing her back into pieces. It’s as if the movie itself can’t look at her for too long without blinking. Ultimately, that frantic editing becomes prophetic: Theresa’s life collapses in a final act that’s as visually fragmented as her psyche. The cuts come faster, more violently, until the last moments dissolve into stroboscopic chaos, a deathbed where montage becomes a moral reckoning. It is a tip-top performance that could give her Oscar-conquering turn in Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL (1977) a run for its money.
Gere, in his first significant role, embodies the reckless magnetism that Theresa can’t resist. As Tony, he’s pure kinetic seduction: a streetwise narcissist whose charm reeks of danger, moving like an exclamation mark in Theresa’s sentence - beautiful, shallow, predatory and violent. Weld, earning an Oscar nomination as Theresa’s sister Katherine, gives a sly, congenial yet unbalanced performance. She’s all glamour without peace, a tacit enabler of Theresa’s unglued mentation. Weld injects a schizoid neurosis into their scenes together: two women negotiating the blurred line between sexual freedom and self-destruction. Her breezy superficiality becomes a tragic compass for Theresa.
Atherton, as the nice-guy suitor James, plays the counterpoint to Gere’s volatility. He’s buttoned-up, sweetly bland, crystallizes one of the film’s themes: the paralysis of goodness in a culture addicted to danger. Lastly, there is Berenger’s brief but brilliant appearance, just in a few minutes, he captures something most actors spend entire careers trying to: the horror of masculine insecurity turned violent, a final, twitching embodiment of all the danger and erotic despair that had been lurking in Theresa’s nightlife odyssey.
As per director Brooks' knack for tackling uncomfortable issues, LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR follows Theresa toward danger and refuses tidy moralizing - and Keaton makes you complicit in that watching. The ending, shocking and terrible, is not cheap shock so much as the inevitable collapse of a long pattern of choices (influenced by the era's signs of times: homophobia, sexism and fragile macho ego). The final sequences land because the film takes the time to show how Theresa's diurnal and nocturnal routines are not parallel lines but intersecting highways. She is both victim and architect of her own lonely geography, and that duality is what the performance lingers on.
Aussie Beresford's CRIMES OF THE HEART is a tonal left turn (who has a consistently copacetic track record of toiling away in the American South): a Southern gothic comedy set in Hazelhurst, Copiah Country, Mississippi, adapted from Beth Henley’s play, whose mood is a delicious wobble between stand-up sorrow and small-town absurdity.
The plot hinges on a scandalized, messy act: Babe (Spacek), the youngest sister, shoots her abusive husband and might fight against a pending conviction, and the family dynamics - guilt, escape, amusement, irresponsibility, resentment, shared history of a mother’s suicide - tumble into a communal reckoning. All three sisters are a bit crazy: Lenny is easily triggered to hysteria for being an inveterate wallflower, Meg (Lange) has an unspecified nervous breakdown for her life stuck in a cul-de-sac, as for Babe, she is both homicidal and suicidal, not to mention having no visible qualms of jumping the bone of an underaged African-American boy!!!
The theatrical origin of the piece gives some scenes a stagey architecture, but it also gives the actors room to let pain and comedy coexist. As Lenny, Keaton s buttoned-up, plain, stifled by duty. She channels spinsterish repression into something heartbreakingly human, all nervous smiles and trembling dignity. Her rendition is so inward it feels like she’s folding herself into smaller and smaller spaces to keep from shattering, yet every twitch of her face betrays the ache of unmet life. And when she finally has had it, her hysteria and liberated anger are incredible to watch.
Lange’s Meg, the failed singer returning home, radiates effortless sensuality and self-absorption (her romantic partner-in-crime is Shepard, so there is rizz to spare). She is magnetic, delivering lines with lazy charm and undercurrents of regret, steadily balancing vanity and deep guilt. Spacek is mesmerizing in portraying lunatic innocence. Her Babe, childlike and unpredictable, a walking open wound, could easily have tipped into caricature, but Spacek makes her strength and sorrow feel cosmic, her eccentricity a form of truth-telling. And guess which actress is the lucky one to cop an Oscar nomination?
Supporting players Harper (as the nosy cousin Chick) and Shepard (as the local heartthrob Doc) provide texture and grounding. Harper plays small-minded piety and self-righteousness with such delectable mannerism that you can half-smell the starch on her collar, while Shepard’s weathered warmth humanizes the nostalgia of small-town Mississippi.
The movie’s key scenes are domestic - the sisters’ late-night conversations about past memories and current state of things, the fragile hilarity when they laugh in grief (that collapse - sudden and facetious - is exactly the film’s beating heart), the belated birthday lake in the end - because the film lives in the horizontal seams of family life and an inalienable sisterly bond, no judgment, no resentment, but an oceanic understanding of each other, warts and all, that is the most precious takeaway of CRIMES OF THE HEART.
One year later, mellowing into her 40s, Keaton headlines BABY BOOM, from the then husband and wife team of Shyer and Meyers, a sitcom-ready fantasy of a certain Reagan-era America, whose premise conforms to Hollywood's role-reversal comedies of the early-mid-1980s. But it is as funny as it is revealing about how gender and ambition being negotiated in the public imagination of its time.
Keaton plays J.C. Wiatt, a high-powered Manhattan management consultant whose life runs with the precision of a Swiss watch. She’s at the top of her game - all tailored suits and early-morning conference calls - until a distant cousin dies and, in a bureaucratic twist of fate, leaves her a baby girl. The arrival of little Elizabeth detonates J.C.’s carefully arranged world like a small, cooing grenade. From there, the film unfolds as a kind of domestic bildungsroman, chronicling J.C.’s uneasy transformation from urban alpha to reluctant nurturer and, finally, to self-reinvented entrepreneur.
Shyer’s direction (and Nancy Meyers’ sharp, sugarcoated script) takes a familiar premise - the career woman (a yuppie dink no less) forced to rediscover her humanity through motherhood - and refines it with an intelligence rare in Hollywood comedies of the time. The film’s watchability comes not from slapstick or sentimentality, but from its quiet attention to logistics: the disarray of business meetings, the childcare procedures, the impossible juggling act of modern womanhood. BABY BOOM is a screwball comedy reimagined as an economic case study, its heroine balancing love, labor, and lactose with the poise of someone learning to breathe again.
The film’s first half, set in the Big Apple, glitters with brisk efficiency. Shyer and cinematographer Fraker shoot the corporate scenes like a GQ spread - steel-gray light, geometric compositions, the sensuality of productivity. The camera loves the streamlined office space, her power lunches, her immaculate control. Then, once she relocates to Vermont - a move both literal and metaphysical - the film softens into a kind of pastoral comedy, full of flannel and snow and failed plumbing. What could have been a cliché becomes, thanks to Keaton’s instinct for the absurd, an oddly poetic depiction of rebirth, whose élan saps a tad for all its cosy familiarity and the gnawing fact the the infant has aged a day through the intervening months.
Keaton’s performance is a wonder of shifting registers. Few actors could make panic look so elegant. She has an almost musical sense of timing, turning moments of frustration into balletic comedy - a sort of high-strung grace that evokes both Katharine Hepburn and early Woody Allen. Her eventual decision to reject both the suffocating corporate hierarchy and the fantasy of total domesticity feels radical — even now. J.C. doesn’t choose between work and motherhood; she rewrites the rules to make both possible on her own terms.
Shepard, as the veterinarian who becomes her romantic counterpart, plays a gentle foil - solid, understated, as if carved from the same Vermont wood that frames J.C.’s new digs. His chemistry with Keaton is warm but never overdetermined; the romance feels like a reward, not a rescue. Supporting players like Ramis (as J.C.’s slick, commitment-averse boyfriend) and Wanamaker (her condescending boss) give the city scenes a sharp satirical edge. They embody the masculine architectures that J.C. must learn to navigate and, ultimately, outsmart.
The film’s humor thrives on contrast: the absurd sight of a power broker haggling over diapers, the dissonance between corporate speech and domestic chaos. And yet, as J.C. reinvents herself by marketing her homemade apple purée as “Country Baby,” Baby Boom deftly satirizes the same capitalist mechanisms it seems to celebrate. The film ends not in renunciation but in re-appropriation - success reimagined through intuition, not aggression.
Shyer and Meyers would later refine this formula in FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1991) and SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (2003), BABY BOOM remains their purest distillation of that distinctly late-20th-century anxiety: how to stay human in an economy that rewards abstraction. The soundtrack by Bill Conti bubbles with optimism, while the snowy landscapes lend an almost Capra-esque glow to J.C.’s reinvention. Yet unlike Capra, Shyer and Meyers understand that happy endings require compromise - and that in modern America, self-fulfillment often arrives wearing the mask of entrepreneurship.
Finally, MARVIN'S ROOM is the dusk-turned-dawn of the quartet. It’s a domestic tragedy masked as an implosive opera: a story of decay, duty, and unexpected hilarity, wrapped in that late-‘90s indie sheen that made even pain look photogenic. Zaks is a theatre man with a taste for confined spaces and human folly, the film is adapted from McPherson’s 1990 play, and you can feel its stage bones creaking amiably beneath the cinematic flesh. But what flesh it is: Keaton, Streep, DiCaprio, De Niro (in a thankless small part as Dr. Wally), Verdon and a terminally ill patriarch who’s mostly just a moan behind a closed door - Marvin himself (Cronyn), the title’s wraithlike landlord of familial bond.
The story, such as it is, unfolds like a dysfunctional family’s group therapy session accidentally televised. Keaton plays Bessie, a Florida spinster whose life has been consumed by caretaking, for both her ailing aunt Ruth (Verdon) and her bedridden father Marvin (echoing Lenny in CRIMES OF THE HEART). When she’s diagnosed with leukemia, Bessie summons her estranged sister Lee (Streep), who arrives from Ohio dragging two sons and a lifetime of dissension, for the bone-marrow matches that might save Bessie's life. One of those sons is Hank (DiCaprio before embarking on the fateful Titanic), all twitchy rebellion and molten frustration. The other is Charlie (Scardino), McPherson’s alter ago, the kind of forgotten ‘90s kid actor who gives every line a faint scent of homework.
There’s something both absurd and deeply human in how the film refuses to pick sides. Bessie, saintly in her selflessness, is also slightly delusional; Lee, selfish and scatterbrained, is refreshingly alive. Their reunion is not cathartic but comic - two women circling the same wound, unsure who deserves the bandage. Zaks doesn’t push the melodrama; he lets it simmer, like soup left too long on a back burner. The result is a film that’s sentimental without ever quite surrendering to sentimentality. You find yourself smiling in the midst of tears, not because it’s manipulative, but because life just works that way - equal parts disaster and deadpan.
Keaton is at her most weathered and humane here; she makes sacrifice look like something stubborn and ordinary rather than glorious, also a pluperfect auntie who opens up to an arson-committing Hank without judgment and pretension.
Streep, meanwhile, does a strange and wonderful thing - she plays Lee as someone slightly bad at acting, a woman trying to perform normalcy after years of neglecting the role. Her voice slides between hard Midwest pragmatism and near-cartoonish pitch, but it works: she’s a survivor of herself. When Keaton and Streep share the screen, it’s like watching two virtuosos dueling on the same violin - notes colliding, harmonies emerging almost by accident. Again, guess which sister is rewarded with an Oscar nomination?
Apart from the heavyweights, Verdon’s presence is also what makes the film breathe and her dancer’s intuition aids in finding her an immaculate comedic timing (her involuntary jolt when being embraced, or the scene where she asks for the orange, they are pitch-perfect little moments of wonder). Her half-senile Ruth is illuminated by an almost impish brightness inside her and becomes the film's secret philosopher. While Streep and Keaton wrestle with guilt and reconciliation, Ruth embodies the peace they’re both chasing. She lives in the in-between: half here, half gone, radiating acceptance without any fuss.
MARVIN'S ROOM walks the line between the mundane and the metaphysical. It’s about illness, yes, but also about inheritance—the emotional kind, passed through sighs and sarcasm. The script, true to its theatrical roots, loves its words a little too much, yet the actors make them feel lived-in. Every exchange carries a faint comic aftertaste, as if the film knows that mortality can also turn into a looking glass in which everyone, briefly, recognizes themselves. It’s about finding warmth in the middle of decay - about realizing that love, at its most inconvenient, might just be the only thing keeping the lights on in Marvin’s household.
Adieu, Ms. Diane Keaton - and thank you, forever. The screen will sorely miss your luminous eccentricity and bountiful inspiration. But the world is also gentler for having known you - and somewhere, I like to think you’re still laughing that unmistakable laugh, tipping your hat to us one last time.
referential entries: Richard Brooks' CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958, 8.2/10); Woody Allen's LOVE AND DEATH (1975, 7.0/10), MANHATTAN (1979, 7.0/10); Bruce Beresford's TENDER MERCIES (1983, 8.2/10), DRIVING MS. DAISY (1989, 8.1/10); Mike Nichols' POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990, 7.1/10); Nancy Meyers' IT'S COMPLICATED (2009, 6.0/10).
在《婴儿热》里，有一段也展示了妈妈们的教育焦虑。她们给宝宝从小就安排了各种各样的课外班：交响乐练习、小提琴课、戏剧课、法语课、电脑课、测量课、和体育课。有个孩子还参加了为期一周集中教学的项目。据说结课后，学前年纪的孩子就能背诵整首爱伦·坡的诗歌《乌鸦》（诗歌主题有爱情、死亡、幻灭和伤悼）和鉴赏著名法国作家保罗·塞尚的画” The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque”。
Another hammer blow hits hard, Diane Keaton (1946-2025) has left us - and somehow, the world feels less rhythmically odd, less nervously human, less alive with the possibility of contradiction. She was the one who made hesitation glamorous, who turned confusion into wit, who wore vulnerability like a perfectly cut suit. If Hollywood ever had a saint that melds weirdness and chicness, she was it.
It is a peculiar pleasure in ruminating an actor’s career not as a chronology of hits but as a private mixtape of moods. The selected foursome, a B-side miscellany compared to her more well-known and successful works, traces the contours of a performer refusing repetition. Keaton is often remembered for her comic cadence and the asymmetrical little-girl-with-big-hat persona, but these films remind you that she was always a shape-shifter - a woman who could tilt into danger, cradle spinsterhood like an honest chore, do physical comedy with a calculator, and find courage to embrace her mortality.
LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR is a dizzying report from the edge, a cold, moral fable dressed as a night out in 1970s New York. Keaton’s Theresa Dunn is a teacher for the deaf by day - a fact the film uses cleverly, not as a gimmick, but as metaphor: she is expert at reading gestures and patient enough to teach deaf kids, and yet she moves into public life seeking noise, risk, sex, and a kind of self-definition that a classroom doesn’t supply. The classroom scenes matter more than you remember: the soft, meticulous way Theresa signs, watches faces, and tends children is set against her bar-room self like two different languages the same body speaks. Those early sequences anchor the character and make the late-night experiments that follow feel less like exhibitionism and more like a frantic attempt at escape. The bars, the drugs, the casual relationships - the film stages them as experiments in identity rather than as mere titillation. Keaton’s achievement is to make Theresa’s appetites ambiguous and therefore human; you feel her intellect under the bravado, and you feel the emptiness, the anguish below the intellect.
One of the film's most defining traits - and most divisive ones - is its editing: that feverish, almost panicky rhythm that keeps cutting between Theresa’s fractured identities. We’re thrown from fluorescent classrooms to smoke-choked clubs, from the intimacy of confession to the chaos of her own impulses - often within seconds, which feels like Theresa’s nervous system: overstimulated, compulsive, desperate for sensation and terrified of stillness. What’s especially striking is how this technique builds unease rather than excitement. Many disco-era films cut rapidly to energize; here, it disorients, as if it has a moral vertigo.
Keaton, for her part, uses this jittery rhythm as fuel. Her performance becomes syncopated - she times her glances, gestures, and hesitations to the film’s unstable pacing, a pause after being touched a certain way, a flinch at a remark that sounds like judgment, the way she tucks the scar on her back away from sight without ever turning the camera into a confessional. In quieter moments - like the scene where she tells her lover she doesn’t believe in love - the editing slows, and we suddenly see the stillness she’s been avoiding. Then the tempo quickens again, slicing her back into pieces. It’s as if the movie itself can’t look at her for too long without blinking. Ultimately, that frantic editing becomes prophetic: Theresa’s life collapses in a final act that’s as visually fragmented as her psyche. The cuts come faster, more violently, until the last moments dissolve into stroboscopic chaos, a deathbed where montage becomes a moral reckoning. It is a tip-top performance that could give her Oscar-conquering turn in Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL (1977) a run for its money.
Gere, in his first significant role, embodies the reckless magnetism that Theresa can’t resist. As Tony, he’s pure kinetic seduction: a streetwise narcissist whose charm reeks of danger, moving like an exclamation mark in Theresa’s sentence - beautiful, shallow, predatory and violent. Weld, earning an Oscar nomination as Theresa’s sister Katherine, gives a sly, congenial yet unbalanced performance. She’s all glamour without peace, a tacit enabler of Theresa’s unglued mentation. Weld injects a schizoid neurosis into their scenes together: two women negotiating the blurred line between sexual freedom and self-destruction. Her breezy superficiality becomes a tragic compass for Theresa.
Atherton, as the nice-guy suitor James, plays the counterpoint to Gere’s volatility. He’s buttoned-up, sweetly bland, crystallizes one of the film’s themes: the paralysis of goodness in a culture addicted to danger. Lastly, there is Berenger’s brief but brilliant appearance, just in a few minutes, he captures something most actors spend entire careers trying to: the horror of masculine insecurity turned violent, a final, twitching embodiment of all the danger and erotic despair that had been lurking in Theresa’s nightlife odyssey.
As per director Brooks' knack for tackling uncomfortable issues, LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR follows Theresa toward danger and refuses tidy moralizing - and Keaton makes you complicit in that watching. The ending, shocking and terrible, is not cheap shock so much as the inevitable collapse of a long pattern of choices (influenced by the era's signs of times: homophobia, sexism and fragile macho ego). The final sequences land because the film takes the time to show how Theresa's diurnal and nocturnal routines are not parallel lines but intersecting highways. She is both victim and architect of her own lonely geography, and that duality is what the performance lingers on.
Aussie Beresford's CRIMES OF THE HEART is a tonal left turn (who has a consistently copacetic track record of toiling away in the American South): a Southern gothic comedy set in Hazelhurst, Copiah Country, Mississippi, adapted from Beth Henley’s play, whose mood is a delicious wobble between stand-up sorrow and small-town absurdity.
The plot hinges on a scandalized, messy act: Babe (Spacek), the youngest sister, shoots her abusive husband and might fight against a pending conviction, and the family dynamics - guilt, escape, amusement, irresponsibility, resentment, shared history of a mother’s suicide - tumble into a communal reckoning. All three sisters are a bit crazy: Lenny is easily triggered to hysteria for being an inveterate wallflower, Meg (Lange) has an unspecified nervous breakdown for her life stuck in a cul-de-sac, as for Babe, she is both homicidal and suicidal, not to mention having no visible qualms of jumping the bone of an underaged African-American boy!!!
The theatrical origin of the piece gives some scenes a stagey architecture, but it also gives the actors room to let pain and comedy coexist. As Lenny, Keaton s buttoned-up, plain, stifled by duty. She channels spinsterish repression into something heartbreakingly human, all nervous smiles and trembling dignity. Her rendition is so inward it feels like she’s folding herself into smaller and smaller spaces to keep from shattering, yet every twitch of her face betrays the ache of unmet life. And when she finally has had it, her hysteria and liberated anger are incredible to watch.
Lange’s Meg, the failed singer returning home, radiates effortless sensuality and self-absorption (her romantic partner-in-crime is Shepard, so there is rizz to spare). She is magnetic, delivering lines with lazy charm and undercurrents of regret, steadily balancing vanity and deep guilt. Spacek is mesmerizing in portraying lunatic innocence. Her Babe, childlike and unpredictable, a walking open wound, could easily have tipped into caricature, but Spacek makes her strength and sorrow feel cosmic, her eccentricity a form of truth-telling. And guess which actress is the lucky one to cop an Oscar nomination?
Supporting players Harper (as the nosy cousin Chick) and Shepard (as the local heartthrob Doc) provide texture and grounding. Harper plays small-minded piety and self-righteousness with such delectable mannerism that you can half-smell the starch on her collar, while Shepard’s weathered warmth humanizes the nostalgia of small-town Mississippi.
The movie’s key scenes are domestic - the sisters’ late-night conversations about past memories and current state of things, the fragile hilarity when they laugh in grief (that collapse - sudden and facetious - is exactly the film’s beating heart), the belated birthday lake in the end - because the film lives in the horizontal seams of family life and an inalienable sisterly bond, no judgment, no resentment, but an oceanic understanding of each other, warts and all, that is the most precious takeaway of CRIMES OF THE HEART.
One year later, mellowing into her 40s, Keaton headlines BABY BOOM, from the then husband and wife team of Shyer and Meyers, a sitcom-ready fantasy of a certain Reagan-era America, whose premise conforms to Hollywood's role-reversal comedies of the early-mid-1980s. But it is as funny as it is revealing about how gender and ambition being negotiated in the public imagination of its time.
Keaton plays J.C. Wiatt, a high-powered Manhattan management consultant whose life runs with the precision of a Swiss watch. She’s at the top of her game - all tailored suits and early-morning conference calls - until a distant cousin dies and, in a bureaucratic twist of fate, leaves her a baby girl. The arrival of little Elizabeth detonates J.C.’s carefully arranged world like a small, cooing grenade. From there, the film unfolds as a kind of domestic bildungsroman, chronicling J.C.’s uneasy transformation from urban alpha to reluctant nurturer and, finally, to self-reinvented entrepreneur.
Shyer’s direction (and Nancy Meyers’ sharp, sugarcoated script) takes a familiar premise - the career woman (a yuppie dink no less) forced to rediscover her humanity through motherhood - and refines it with an intelligence rare in Hollywood comedies of the time. The film’s watchability comes not from slapstick or sentimentality, but from its quiet attention to logistics: the disarray of business meetings, the childcare procedures, the impossible juggling act of modern womanhood. BABY BOOM is a screwball comedy reimagined as an economic case study, its heroine balancing love, labor, and lactose with the poise of someone learning to breathe again.
The film’s first half, set in the Big Apple, glitters with brisk efficiency. Shyer and cinematographer Fraker shoot the corporate scenes like a GQ spread - steel-gray light, geometric compositions, the sensuality of productivity. The camera loves the streamlined office space, her power lunches, her immaculate control. Then, once she relocates to Vermont - a move both literal and metaphysical - the film softens into a kind of pastoral comedy, full of flannel and snow and failed plumbing. What could have been a cliché becomes, thanks to Keaton’s instinct for the absurd, an oddly poetic depiction of rebirth, whose élan saps a tad for all its cosy familiarity and the gnawing fact the the infant has aged a day through the intervening months.
Keaton’s performance is a wonder of shifting registers. Few actors could make panic look so elegant. She has an almost musical sense of timing, turning moments of frustration into balletic comedy - a sort of high-strung grace that evokes both Katharine Hepburn and early Woody Allen. Her eventual decision to reject both the suffocating corporate hierarchy and the fantasy of total domesticity feels radical — even now. J.C. doesn’t choose between work and motherhood; she rewrites the rules to make both possible on her own terms.
Shepard, as the veterinarian who becomes her romantic counterpart, plays a gentle foil - solid, understated, as if carved from the same Vermont wood that frames J.C.’s new digs. His chemistry with Keaton is warm but never overdetermined; the romance feels like a reward, not a rescue. Supporting players like Ramis (as J.C.’s slick, commitment-averse boyfriend) and Wanamaker (her condescending boss) give the city scenes a sharp satirical edge. They embody the masculine architectures that J.C. must learn to navigate and, ultimately, outsmart.
The film’s humor thrives on contrast: the absurd sight of a power broker haggling over diapers, the dissonance between corporate speech and domestic chaos. And yet, as J.C. reinvents herself by marketing her homemade apple purée as “Country Baby,” Baby Boom deftly satirizes the same capitalist mechanisms it seems to celebrate. The film ends not in renunciation but in re-appropriation - success reimagined through intuition, not aggression.
Shyer and Meyers would later refine this formula in FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1991) and SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (2003), BABY BOOM remains their purest distillation of that distinctly late-20th-century anxiety: how to stay human in an economy that rewards abstraction. The soundtrack by Bill Conti bubbles with optimism, while the snowy landscapes lend an almost Capra-esque glow to J.C.’s reinvention. Yet unlike Capra, Shyer and Meyers understand that happy endings require compromise - and that in modern America, self-fulfillment often arrives wearing the mask of entrepreneurship.
Finally, MARVIN'S ROOM is the dusk-turned-dawn of the quartet. It’s a domestic tragedy masked as an implosive opera: a story of decay, duty, and unexpected hilarity, wrapped in that late-‘90s indie sheen that made even pain look photogenic. Zaks is a theatre man with a taste for confined spaces and human folly, the film is adapted from McPherson’s 1990 play, and you can feel its stage bones creaking amiably beneath the cinematic flesh. But what flesh it is: Keaton, Streep, DiCaprio, De Niro (in a thankless small part as Dr. Wally), Verdon and a terminally ill patriarch who’s mostly just a moan behind a closed door - Marvin himself (Cronyn), the title’s wraithlike landlord of familial bond.
The story, such as it is, unfolds like a dysfunctional family’s group therapy session accidentally televised. Keaton plays Bessie, a Florida spinster whose life has been consumed by caretaking, for both her ailing aunt Ruth (Verdon) and her bedridden father Marvin (echoing Lenny in CRIMES OF THE HEART). When she’s diagnosed with leukemia, Bessie summons her estranged sister Lee (Streep), who arrives from Ohio dragging two sons and a lifetime of dissension, for the bone-marrow matches that might save Bessie's life. One of those sons is Hank (DiCaprio before embarking on the fateful Titanic), all twitchy rebellion and molten frustration. The other is Charlie (Scardino), McPherson’s alter ago, the kind of forgotten ‘90s kid actor who gives every line a faint scent of homework.
There’s something both absurd and deeply human in how the film refuses to pick sides. Bessie, saintly in her selflessness, is also slightly delusional; Lee, selfish and scatterbrained, is refreshingly alive. Their reunion is not cathartic but comic - two women circling the same wound, unsure who deserves the bandage. Zaks doesn’t push the melodrama; he lets it simmer, like soup left too long on a back burner. The result is a film that’s sentimental without ever quite surrendering to sentimentality. You find yourself smiling in the midst of tears, not because it’s manipulative, but because life just works that way - equal parts disaster and deadpan.
Keaton is at her most weathered and humane here; she makes sacrifice look like something stubborn and ordinary rather than glorious, also a pluperfect auntie who opens up to an arson-committing Hank without judgment and pretension.
Streep, meanwhile, does a strange and wonderful thing - she plays Lee as someone slightly bad at acting, a woman trying to perform normalcy after years of neglecting the role. Her voice slides between hard Midwest pragmatism and near-cartoonish pitch, but it works: she’s a survivor of herself. When Keaton and Streep share the screen, it’s like watching two virtuosos dueling on the same violin - notes colliding, harmonies emerging almost by accident. Again, guess which sister is rewarded with an Oscar nomination?
Apart from the heavyweights, Verdon’s presence is also what makes the film breathe and her dancer’s intuition aids in finding her an immaculate comedic timing (her involuntary jolt when being embraced, or the scene where she asks for the orange, they are pitch-perfect little moments of wonder). Her half-senile Ruth is illuminated by an almost impish brightness inside her and becomes the film's secret philosopher. While Streep and Keaton wrestle with guilt and reconciliation, Ruth embodies the peace they’re both chasing. She lives in the in-between: half here, half gone, radiating acceptance without any fuss.
MARVIN'S ROOM walks the line between the mundane and the metaphysical. It’s about illness, yes, but also about inheritance—the emotional kind, passed through sighs and sarcasm. The script, true to its theatrical roots, loves its words a little too much, yet the actors make them feel lived-in. Every exchange carries a faint comic aftertaste, as if the film knows that mortality can also turn into a looking glass in which everyone, briefly, recognizes themselves. It’s about finding warmth in the middle of decay - about realizing that love, at its most inconvenient, might just be the only thing keeping the lights on in Marvin’s household.
Adieu, Ms. Diane Keaton - and thank you, forever. The screen will sorely miss your luminous eccentricity and bountiful inspiration. But the world is also gentler for having known you - and somewhere, I like to think you’re still laughing that unmistakable laugh, tipping your hat to us one last time.
referential entries: Richard Brooks' CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958, 8.2/10); Woody Allen's LOVE AND DEATH (1975, 7.0/10), MANHATTAN (1979, 7.0/10); Bruce Beresford's TENDER MERCIES (1983, 8.2/10), DRIVING MS. DAISY (1989, 8.1/10); Mike Nichols' POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990, 7.1/10); Nancy Meyers' IT'S COMPLICATED (2009, 6.0/10).
Title: Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Year: 1977
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Director/Screenwriter: Richard Brooks
based on the novel by Judith Rossner
Composer: Artie Kane
Cinematographer: William A. Fraker
Editor: George Grenville
Cast:
Diane Keaton
Richard Gere
Tuesday Weld
William Atherton
Richard Kiley
Alan Feinstein
Tom Berenger
Priscilla Pointer
Laurie Prange
Joel Fabiani
Julius Harris
LeVar Burton
Richard Bright
Brian Dennehy
Rutanya Alda
Carole Mallory
Rating: 7.8/10
Title: Crimes of the Heart
Year: 1986
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Bruce Beresford
Screenwriter: Beth Henley
based on her own play
Composer: Georges Delerue
Cinematographer: Dante Spinotti
Editor: Anne Goursaud
Cast:
Diane Keaton
Jessica Lange
Sissy Spacek
Tess Harper
Sam Shepard
David Carpenter
Hurd Hatfield
Beeson Carroll
Gregory Eugene Travis
Rating: 7.3/10
Title: Baby Boom
Year: 1987
Genre: Comedy
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Charles Shyer
Screenwriters: Nancy Meyers, Charles Shyer
Composer: Bill Conti
Cinematographer: William A. Fraker
Editor: Lynzee Klingman
Cast:
Diane Keaton
Kristina Kennedy
Michelle Kennedy
Sam Shepard
Harold Ramis
Sam Wanamaker
James Spader
Pat Hingle
George Petrie
Britt Leach
Mary Gross
Robin Bartlett
Chris Noth
Rating: 6.6/10
Title: Marvin's Room
Year: 1996
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Jerry Zaks
Screenwriter: Scott McPherson
based on his own play
Composer: Rachel Portman
Cinematographer: Piotr Sobocinski
Editor: Jim Clark
Cast:
Meryl Streep
Leonardo DiCaprio
Diane Keaton
Robert De Niro
Hume Cronyn
Gwen Verdon
Hal Scardino
Dan Hedaya
Margo Martindale
Cynthia Nixon
Bitty Schram
Rating: 7.2/10
关于教育焦虑的影视作品其实还蛮多的，比如韩国的《天空之城》和印度的《起跑线》等。
在《婴儿热》里，有一段也展示了妈妈们的教育焦虑。她们给宝宝从小就安排了各种各样的课外班：交响乐练习、小提琴课、戏剧课、法语课、电脑课、测量课、和体育课。有个孩子还参加了为期一周集中教学的项目。据说结课后，学前年纪的孩子就能背诵整首爱伦·坡的诗歌《乌鸦》（诗歌主题有爱情、死亡、幻灭和伤悼）和鉴赏著名法国作家保罗·塞尚的画” The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque”。
让这么小的孩子囫囵吞枣地背诵对他们来说那么抽象的诗歌真的有意义吗？妈妈们这么忙碌地给孩子报班真的不是为了自己心里的慰藉或攀比，就是单纯的为了孩子好吗？
距离这部电影上映已经几十年了，多少父母还是在拼尽财力和精力去给孩子报各式各样听上去对孩子有用的班，想让孩子最终走上精英之路。据说2019年妇科医院给孩子看杜曼闪卡，闪一下要至少300元。全脑开发之类的课程更是价格不菲，99节课均价4万元左右。且不说这些课程是不是真的对孩子有益，课程的价格已经高得太过离谱了。很多时候，父母们根本没去仔细调查这些课上了之后对孩子是否真的有益，就随大流地上赶着去交了智商税。
教育焦虑是个很难解决的社会问题，人口越密集、竞争越激烈的地方就越严重。作为家长，我们应该更加理性地看待孩子的教育。我们应该明白能成为社会上精英的毕竟是极少数，不能用爱的名义过度给孩子施压，让孩子一直处在压抑、不快乐的家庭氛围中。我们应该学会因材施教，不要再被那些教育机构和身边人牵着鼻子走了。
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