Pregnant Pas [MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN & JUNIOR] wrote:

People who find this good-natured comedy amusing are apt to describe it as “cute,” though if Rietman had contrived to make a jaunty heart-warmer about Julia Roberts sprouting a penis, I doubt that the same adjective would apply, even with the best will in the world. The fact remains that patriarchal comedy is the operative mode here, and every gesture made to alter that is strictly salad dressing.

Even the film’s title tells you as much, though the movie’s dialogue works overtime trying to persuade you otherwise. “Junior” is the name assigned by Thompson’s character to her egg, which DeVito swipes to implant inside Schwarzenegger — after Schwarzenegger fertilizes it with his sperm — to test a fertility drug the two men have been developing. Thompson calls her egg “Junior,” she explains at one point, because she doesn’t know whether it’s male or female, and at another point Schwarzenegger calls his expected child “Junior” for the same reason. But “Junior” is not a neutral term in relation to gender; it’s simply in the interests of this movie to pretend otherwise.

Reed’s pregnancy is carefully kept in sync with Schwarzenegger’s to stave off potential audience objections, and by the end of the movie, Thompson is allowed to become pregnant as well. But one might argue that in this story a woman’s becoming pregnant is only proof that she’s an honorary guy.

The principal source of the humor, it seems, is the usually unacknowledged fact that Schwarzenegger’s appearance and usual screen persona already has certain feminine and even maternal qualities, which this movie literalizes. In manner (i.e., voice and gesture) as well as appearance, Schwarzenegger, like Sylvester Stallone, has more in common with Jane Russell, Esther Williams, Jayne Mansfield, Anita Ekberg, and Dolly Parton than with the principal (and principally lean and mean) macho movie icons of the past — Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood. (Perhaps only Elvis Presley qualifies as a male star who encompassed both physical types over the course of a single career, at least if one gives precedence to sheer mass over muscles.)

If Reitman had the energy and imagination of a Frank Tashlin — who directed Jayne Mansfield in her two most memorable pictures, The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, offering an irreverent, cartoony look at this country’s unreasoning taste for opulence in the process – Junior might have offered a satirical development and celebration of this paradox rather than a simple exploitation of its most obvious aspects. What immediately derails such a possibility is a reliance on stereotypical pregnant-wife behavior for most of its laughs — a string of pat cliches designed to mock women more than Schwarzenegger.