Junior (1994)

Junior arrives in 1994 with a premise that would, in a later and more anxious decade, have arrived wrapped in a thesis. A research geneticist played by Arnold Schwarzenegger implants himself with a donor ovum to test an unapproved fertility drug, then carries the pregnancy to term against every reasonable expectation. Ivan Reitman directs it as a straight high-concept comedy, and that is the crucial fact. The film has no argument to make about gender, medicine, or the body. It has a man with a belly and a dream, and it would like us to laugh at both.

The remarkable thing, examined under the cold light of classification, is how thoroughly the film abstains from instruction. Danny DeVito's obstetrician schemes about pharmaceutical funding, and the script treats this as farce, not as an indictment of an industry. Emma Thompson's cryogenics researcher is a scientist with her own ova in the freezer, which is a plot complication and nothing more. Nobody delivers a speech. Nobody turns to the camera to explain what we should feel. The male pregnancy is played for morning sickness, sore nipples, and a scene in which our hero weeps at a television commercial. It is a body joke wearing a lab coat, and it knows it.

We are left with a curiosity. A studio comedy from the mid-nineties that touches pregnancy, fertility, corporate medicine, and the malleability of the male body, and declines every invitation to sermonize. It earned Golden Globe nominations for its leads and an Academy Award nomination for its theme song, which tells you where the era's priorities lay. The film is amiable, weightless, and entirely innocent of the cultural battles that would later be fought on ground it briefly occupied. We file it accordingly, with a small sigh and a clean ledger.