Review: BABIES

While I was biding my time, waiting for my child, Godot, to arrive, I went and saw "BABIES" the documentary.  I hadn't read anything about it, only that it was advertised as a "If you loved 'March of the Penguins' you'll love..." type parallel.  And who doesn't love penguins and babies and penguin babies and matinees? Exactly.

Well here is the rub.  WARNING:  Spoilers galore.  The beauty of "Penguins" for me was the raw and bright scenery of Antarctica, the honest portrayal of the life stages of the penguins, the struggle, the unique co-parenting and sacrifices made by the parent penguins, and then the sweet advent of the wee little pengies.

BABIES, however, has an agenda.  And I sort of hate documentaries that make up our minds for us ::cough Michael Moore cough::.  The contrast between First World Overparenting and Third World Primitive Parenting in BABIES is stark. The First Worlders just look like idiots with their parenting guides and music for munchkin classes, and the Third Worlders are portrayed as very "authentic" hard-working people who may not be able to swat every fly away or shoo every chicken from entering their tents, but they do seem to have an engaged clue about parenting.  I didn't buy it.  Parenting is not that cookie cutter, and every day presents its own struggles and opportunities to learn to be a better parent no matter where or how you live.

There are a lot of unanswered questions in the film, like where are the fathers in Namibia, and how long does the camera crew wait to intervene when one of the neglected kids is about to get hurt, and why is the US mother buck naked in her whirlpool???  There are also a lot of beautiful parts, too, but it is hard to appreciate the singular moments in each baby's life because the next scene will inevitably critique the previous scene, which is not quite fair and teeters on the simplistic.

I think it would have been more worthwhile to let the parents speak about certain decisions they had made or were making as parents and how responsive or unresponsive they were finding their children to these decisions, rather than offering slices of life - tantrums, breastfeeding, sleeping, crawling, etc. - that were quite narrowly open to interpretation.

But dang if those babies all edible.  I can't wait to nibble on Godot!