The Travolta/Cage Project #27 Look Who's Talking (1989) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

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Without its groan-worthy central gimmick of the audience being able to hear what a baby with the personality of a bad open mic comic and the voice of Bruce Willis is thinking the surprise 1989 blockbuster Look Who’s Talking would probably be twice as good and a quarter as successful at the box-office.

Amy Heckerling’s romantic comedy wasn’t just a monster hit that came out of nowhere and grossed nearly 300 million dollars; it was a pop culture phenomenon that spawned two sequels of rapidly diminishing quality and a television spin-off, Baby Talk, with a shaggy, pre-stardom George Clooney in the John Travolta role.

The Fast Times at Ridgemont High auteur managed to smuggle a deeply personal, often funny and smart film about an “other woman” who has a child with a married man she’s lightly stalking and her experiences as a neurotic single mother trying to find a father figure for her baby by Trojan horsing it into a wildly commercial, oldies-filled wacky romantic comedy about a sassy talking baby.

Look Who’s Talking paid a steep price creatively for its astonishing, almost unprecedented commercial success, most notably in the form of a talking baby conceit that’s jarringly, egregiously unfunny from the very beginning and so utterly unnecessary that it would be easy to remove the “funny” baby voices from the film without anyone noticing, since there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the lazy wisecracks of baby Mikey and anything the baby actors playing him are doing.

What if you could hear your baby’s uncensored and outrageous thoughts through the prism of Bruce Willis in full-on Return of Bruno/Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler spokesman mode? What if your pre-verbal baby had a head full of lazy one-liners? What if your tiny tot had the gib gift of gab of a third-rate 50 year old punch-up man? What if your precious little baby was a generic smart-ass whose internal monologue was a hackneyed litany of bad jokes?

That’s the utterly hack yet strangely irresistible promise of Look Who’s Talking, which boasts so many can’t miss elements that it’s easy to forget just how many aspects of the film not only don’t work but are egregiously terrible.

A Cronenbergian nightmare: Mikey in the womb

The film’s leisurely parade of mistakes begins with animation of little baby Mikey as a fetus inside the womb of Mollie Jensen (Kirstie Alley) so nightmarishly off that it recalls alternately the titular monstrosity of Eraserhead and pro-choice propaganda designed to illustrate that sometimes it’s not only acceptable to abort a fetus: it’s absolutely necessary, lest a great evil like Baby Mikey be unleashed upon the world.

Baby Mikey has such a flimsy, one note shtick that I was tired of the tedious little shit well before he’s even born, though his material does not getting better with age. It doesn’t help that his early material includes noticing his freshly emerged penis for the first time, mistaking it for a third arm and wondering when he’ll be able to stick it in his mouth.

Bad taste gags like that, or babysitter/love interest John Travolta leering at a large-breasted woman in a low-cut shirt and snickering to the baby in his care, “You spend nine months of your life trying to get out and the rest of your life trying to get in” and the baby replying, with “Yeah, tell me about it” awkwardly are supposed to be naughty but nice, saucy but cute and salacious but adorable. Instead, the movie’s casual over-sexualization of babies is just gross and deeply unfunny. The movie’s A Cinemasocre and boffo gross suggest the masses felt otherwise.

Look Who’s Talking is ferociously devoted to pandering to the desires of the lowest common denominator. It’s so calculating and insecure that it doesn’t trust that John Travolta palling around with an adorable baby as its beloved babysitter/father figure to the accompaniment of all the songs you know and love from every other successful movie will be enough to sustain the audience’s attention so they throw in the stupid yet insanely successful gimmick of the sub-par baby’s crap thoughts to make it even more nakedly, desperately commercial.

A montage of Travolta and the baby boogying to’ “Walking on Sunshine”, in accordance with the Katrina and the Waves Act of 1983, which dictated that every 1980s comedy feature either “Walking on Sunshine” or James Brown’s “I Feel Good” to illustrate, through song, that characters are so ecstatic that they feel like they’re walking on sunshine, or just plain feel good, works as a perfect storm of audience-friendly elements.

This shameless commercialism offsets the film’s many lumpy, weirdly non-commercial elements, like devoting its first twenty minutes to Mollie’s doomed obsession with Albert (George Segal), her married, much older boyfriend and her delusional belief that as soon as he’s able to free himself from his bulimic, needy wife, he’ll be able to devote himself wholeheartedly to her and their baby boy.

Nobody remembers Look Who’s Talking as a movie where a gorgeous, glamorous yet relatable Kirstie Alley pins all of her hopes and dreams on the honesty and fidelity of a shameless philanderer decades older than her, only to realize that he’s too selfish to be able to commit to being a husband and father after she catches him cheating on her and his wife with a second mistress.

Yet about a third of this bizarrely bloated movie’s 95 minute runtime is devoted to a subplot that angrily begs for the editing room floor and contributes nothing of value yet takes up substantial space all the same.

The Albert subplot is more poignant, however, once you discover that, according to Heckerling’s daughter Violet Ramis Stiel, her secret father Harold Ramis, who she did not learn was her real daddy rather than Police Academy screenwriter Neil Israel until she was 19 years old, was the inspiration for Albert.

So when our heroine gushes about how charming and irresistible and sexy her married soulmate is, it makes more sense in the context of Heckerling’s own life than with a 55 year old George Segal playing Mollie’s unlikely ideal, her perfect man. True, Segal was a total stud as recently as a quarter century earlier when he played a virile young professor in 1965’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but by 1989 Segal was less a sexy silver fox than just silver, less distinguished than just old.

Look Who’s Talking is remembered fondly, if incompletely, as a movie where John Travolta wins back our hearts along with Kirstie Alley, and Bruce Willis wisecracks his way to boffo box-office as a bro baby with a mouth full of sass and a heart of gold yet Travolta doesn’t show up until nearly twenty minutes in, when his taxi driver meets cute with Mollie when her water breaks and he ends up racing her to the hospital, then sticking around far longer than it all plausible, both at the hospital and afterwards.

Romantic comedy formula in the 1980s unfortunately dictated that dashing romantic leads had to behave like creeps in order to experience emotional growth. Sure enough, when Mollie tells the nosy cab-driver there’s no husband or boyfriend in the picture he asks her if she’s a “l-sbo”, which certainly has not become less offensive in the ensuing decades.

James similarly makes leering comments about Mollie’s larger, milk-engorged breasts way before it would be at all appropriate to do so and engages in some SERIOUSLY heteronormative behavior when he and Mikey are leering at a woman’s large, partially exposed breasts and a horny, clearly aroused James says to the baby in his care, “I see you staring at that. You must be thinking the same way I am. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”, too which the baby hilariously replies, “Yeah, lunch!”

See, James thought that the baby would have the same aroused response to breasts that a sexually mature adult heterosexual man would, but because he’s a baby Mikey just sees bosoms, shapely or otherwise, as a source of nourishment. It works on no levels!

Nothing in my life gives me more joy than my babies, my two year old and five old boys, but I spent ALL of Look Who’s Talking hoping the pint-sized shtick-slinger of the title would shut up.

Like Alley, Travolta is ill-served by standard-issue romantic comedy bullshit machinery that keeps two people perfect for each other apart and bickering for arbitrary reasons until they realize they’re made for each other, most notably in the form of a groaningly convoluted plot that calls on single guy James to babysit Mikey for free in exchange for being allowed to use Mollie’s address so his Dementia-addled grandfather Abe Vigoda can stay in a nicer nursing home.

This means that that James spends much of the film babysitting Mikey while Mollie goes on a disastrous dates with accountants and accountant types in her search to find a father for her baby other than the gorgeous, charming single man with a tight bond with her baby who seemingly spends most of his free time in her house, of course. She couldn’t possibly be with James permanently because he’s working class and drives a taxi and is perpetually looking for ways to save money and get things for free.

Mollie’s class-based rationale for rejecting the man of her dreams is made explicit in a dream sequence where she imagines James as her husband and the father of her children where she’s the raspy-voiced matriarch of a crude working-class brood her hubby entertains through belching. It’s supposed to make life with James look like a comic nightmare of bad taste and proletarian crudeness but Travolta’s loutish charm makes this tableau seem incongruously appealing, if not quite idyllic.

In his first big comeback role, Travolta radiates movie star charm though it speaks to how far his star had fallen that he found himself playing an unmistakably supporting role as the love interest in a modestly budgeted Kirstie Alley vehicle where the central draw is ostensibly a dumb gimmick that never works rather than the beloved star of Grease and Saturday Night Fever at his most appealing.

Taking a supporting role reaped huge dividends for Travolta professionally, even if he ended up making substantially less than Bruce Willis, who picked up an eight figure payday for a few days work.

Look Who’s Talking should have made Kirstie Alley a movie star. These days Alley is best known for tweets like one where she gushed of Trump’s handling of COVID-19, “Dear Mr. President, @realDonaldTrump I wanted to thank you for ur recent decorum, sincerity, & care towards us. You’re taking charge & leading in a manner needed & wanted for this country. I highly commend you for ur boundless energy & willingness to solve problems. Thank you” but she is an utter delight here, gorgeous yet relatable, a terrific physical comedienne in the body of a retro bombshell.

Look Who’s Talking works in spite of itself. It feels like a 1970s comedy-drama about a neurotic single mother who conceives a child during an extramarital affair and then must find a father for her baby smashed headfirst into the most screamingly commercial 1980s family romantic comedy possible.

It’s a movie divided against itself and weighed down with an abysmal central gimmick. Yet that did not matter with audiences in love with the baby, and Travolta, and a soundtrack cynically stuffed with oldies audiences have always loved and will always love.

The fact that Look Who’s Talking is one of Travolta’s big successes speaks to how much more impressive Cage’s filmography is. It’s overflowing with stone-cold classics whereas the best Travolta can do most of the time is movies like Look Who’s Talking, which are modest if undeniably charming in that inimitably cornball John Travolta fashion.