REVIEW: The Back-up Plan (2)

FORCED LABOUR

The idea of a single-mom on screen is so far-fetched by Hollywood standards that within minutes of establishing Zoe's (Jennifer Lopez, very painful) intention of getting pregnant via an unknown sperm donor in The Back-Up Plan, she's thrown into the same cab with good-looking Stan (Alex O'Loughlin, great body but otherwise clueless). The cab cliché is clear indication of the fact that whoever wrote this film (Kate Angelo) wasn't really going to put much imagination into the process. Just throw two reasonably attractive actors together in New York, make them hate, then love each other, surround them with stereotypical friends, doctors, grandmoms and assorted other well-wishers who'll spout occasionally clever lines; then throw the couple apart, add a love song in the background and before 90 minutes are up, they're bound to exchange vows and get back together to everyone's relief. Bingo! It's a fool-proof formula.

Except, The Back-Up Plan is only the 300th such romantic comedy and in that, a particularly insipid one. Zoe and Stan both have cool professions -- she runs a pet shop and he is a cheese-maker with a stall at the farmer's market and a fabulous farmhouse tucked away somewhere in the countryside, which, we will inevitably get to visit at some point in the narrative. He doesn't want to have kids, she doesn't trust men. Get the drift? Both characters are about as believable as cardboard cut-outs (and played with as much conviction by the lead pair) and even the locations look jaded.

As stereotypes go, there's a gregarious black parent of three who Stan encounters in the neighbourhood park and whose sagely advice he relies on to decide whether he actually wants to play father to Zoe's babies (yes, she's having twins, as it turns out). Then there are the aggressive women at the 'single mother's group' she briefly attends. Zoe's octogenarian grandmother who has been giving her fiancé a runaround for 22 years, finally comes around and decides to get married -- for no apparent reason. The whole idea is to device plot points for the lead pair to keep moving towards and then away from each other and then together again.

It seems like director Alan Poul didn't have much of a plan when he started off with this film. The studio probably got Jennifer Lopez's dates and decided to build a story around this momentous event. What one would really like to see is a film about a single woman who decides to have a baby and does just that, without tripping over the first man in sight. For,there are enough such women around in the real world to emulate on screen. The question is, does the male-dominated world of Hollywood/Bollywood have the courage to portray a smart and independent woman who doesn't need a man to make her life worthwhile?