What to Expect While You’re Expecting: Review

I assume large ensemble movies exist because it is difficult to write a singular, cohesive plotline that can captivate the audience for the entire film. This movie only strengthened my prejudices against star-studded multi-plot films. Very few of these films, with the exception of “Love Actually” and “Paris, Je T’Aime,” manage to feature good acting, unique and different stories, and witty dialogue. When there are so many different characters, each plotline feels fragmented and sloppily written.   

You don’t need to watch this entire movie to know how these plots will unfold. All you need to watch is the trailer—it tells you just about everything about the characters and what kinds of trials and tribulations they will face. The trailer anticipates the lame humor and the caricatures that unfortunately decide to reproduce. Litmus test #1: If the trailer tells you way too much about the movie, you should just stop right there and watch something more worth your time.

We follow the individual journeys of five couples in Atlanta, Georgia that are expecting babies. As the owner of a baby store and a children’s book author, Wendy Cooper (Elizabeth Banks) sells sugarcoated fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood for a living. After two years of trying, she finally gets pregnant. Her hapless husband, Gary (Ben Falcone), struggles to meet her demands and compete with his father, Ramsey (Dennis Quaid), who is expecting twins with his hot young wife, Skyler (Brooklyn Decker). Holly (Jennifer Lopez), a struggling photographer, is seeking to adopt a baby, but her husband, Alex (Rodrigo Santoro), feels less sure. Holly’s co-worker recommends Alex to the Dudes’ Club, a support group for young dads. Vic (Chris Rock) leads this zany posse and doles out one piece of advice after another. And we witness young ex-lovers (Anna Kendrick and Chase Crawford) that head rival food trucks and rekindle their love. These families all happen to watch “Celebrity Dance Factor,” a reality dance competition show. The winning couple is a TV fitness guru, Jules (Cameron Diaz) and a professional dancer (Matthew Morrison), who have chemistry both on and off-screen. Not surprisingly, Jules turns out to be pregnant. It also turns out that Gary used to be on Jules’ weight loss show, revealing this world to be more tightly interconnected and commercialized than expected.

I’m trying to understand why they would clutter the movie with so many extraneous characters. The only characters that I cared about were the young Coopers and maybe Alex and Holly’s story, largely because the Dudes’ Group told many silly and wonky jokes. Because the characters are so poorly developed, I started identifying them by the corresponding cast member because they are so uninteresting and unoriginal. Of course, Diaz’s fitness guru tries to be the alpha male in the relationship and insists on everything, including her baby’s circumcision, to go her way. And of course, Lopez’s character has a sappy monologue about how she feels guilty for her infertility. They are differentiable solely by the actors and actresses that play them.

At first, I thought Wendy’s character was excessively farcical and annoying. She even sets an alarm on her phone for her ovulation periods, and she smashes her employee’s cell phone because the radiation is harmful to her unborn child. As stereotypical and over-the-top as she was, she felt more real and funnier than the other characters, especially when she breaks down during her keynote speech at the ABC Child’s Expo. This may also be due to Banks’ superior performance. Instead of the pregnancy glow that she always wanted, she finds herself unable to stop peeing and falling asleep on the couch. On the other hand, Skyler is born to be pregnant. She can still pull off Pilates, cardio kickboxing, and six-inch heels without feeling extra inconveniences. Of course, Wendy delivers a message of social regeneration and renewal when she realizes that her baby “was the glow” that she was looking for all along.

Her husband, Gary, is a more sympathetic character. His father, a retired NASCAR driver, represents the stereotypical alpha male who makes everything into a competition. He constantly one-ups Gary, especially when he brags about expecting not one but two babies (twins!). He is basically the most condescending and smug father one can imagine, especially since he keeps offering Gary wads of cash. While it is occasionally entertaining, this strained father-son relationship is nothing that we haven’t seen before.

The plotline with Jules so obviously satirized the Hollywood industry in a tacky and dull manner. She was supposed to be a caricature of Jillian Michaels, and Celebrity Dance Factor is basically “Dancing With the Stars.” “Lose it or Weep “was obviously a spoof of “The Biggest Loser.” Such spoofs add to the movie’s cheap, commercialized feel.  

The movie also seems regressive in terms of gender dynamics. It reinforces the idea that women gravitate towards babies due to their maternal instinct, while men must take some time to develop this. Alex, who rides a motorcycle and wants to keep his condo instead of buying a house, represents the ultra male who fears parenthood. The “Dudes” are supposed to represent a counterexample to this sort of masculinity, but they come off as screwball, incompetent parents. But perhaps I’m taking this way too seriously; it is, after all, just a goofy family comedy.

Despite its many flaws, the movie doesn’t do a bad job representing the different routes to starting a family. It can happen through a regular delivery, caesarian section, and adoption. Some couples suffer miscarriages. Some women choose natural birth over the epidural. Starting a family requires significant effort and planning, but these events seldom go exactly according to plan. The movie asks us to sit back and root for these good-looking couples, but it’s hard to sit through such a tacky and formulaic ensemble piece.