The Boss Baby (DreamWorks Animation, 2017)
In a recent Fresh Air interview with Alec Baldwin, Terry Gross welcomed the fifty-nine-year-old star, “First things first, congrats on The Boss Baby.” I couldn’t help but laugh at this opening — a title like The Boss Baby (2017) solicits mockery, memes, and ironic engagement, not a serious, engaging panel discussion hosted by Terry’s colleague David Bianculli. The idea of a computer-animated film about a baby played by the deep-voiced poster child of a Hollywood dynasty is absurd. Its trailer builds up to the punch line: a baby gets introduced to his family, the sibling is jealous, and then boom, the baby is played by Alec Baldwin, suggesting the film itself would be one note — the same joke of an adult’s consciousness trapped in a baby’s body over and over again. However, when I watched the film a month later, not only was I surprised, I was moved.
The Boss Baby, starring Alec Baldwin, Jimmy Kimmel, Tobey McGuire, and Steve Buscemi, is a surrealist tour de force that somehow manages to succeed where many have failed — reconciling capitalism with a humanist notion of the family. The film revolves around a cliché premise: an only child suddenly has to deal with a new sibling. Tobey McGuire plays Timothy Templeton as an adult, narrating the story about a hyper-imaginative seven-year-old boy grappling with the reality of now being an older brother. The Boss Baby’s genius stems from its use of a dreamlike, dissociative reality. Timothy’s fantasies of jungle adventures and maritime voyages casually weave into the actual plot, introducing an ambiguity of whether the “Boss Baby” is real or fake. An early scene in which his parents are reading him a bedtime story hints that Timothy Templeton’s mom (Lisa Kudrow) is actually pregnant. However, the baby isn’t born in a hospital. Instead, he makes his entrance in a taxi parked outside of Timothy’s idyllic suburban home. Once the Boss Baby comes into Timothy’s life, things take a turn for the worse — his parents become subservient to an egomaniacal CEO, waking up in the early dawn to satisfy every command and change ever diaper.
The Boss Baby (DreamWorks Animation, 2017)
The most satisfying scene in the film is when Timothy walks in on the baby talking like an actual adult. Wearing a button-down shirt and sock suspenders while barking orders on the phone, the baby’s introduction as “The Boss” has impeccable comedic timing. Alec Baldwin’s performance echoes Robin Williams’s rendition of the Jeanie in Aladdin (1992) — he elevates the material by endowing it with a controlled chaos. Powered by Baldwin’s charisma, the character has a self-awareness of its blatant dualism. Throughout the film, the Boss Baby is portrayed as the platonic ideal of a businessman; he’s fast-talking, no nonsense, cold, and needlessly ruthless. When Timothy cries, the Boss Baby exclaims, “Where’s HR when you need them!” This, and many other sharply written workplace jokes, makes for some biting commentary. The start and end of a developmental narrative — a baby and a CEO — collapsed into one, exposing that positions of power truly do make people revert to their lizard brains.
The Boss Baby, Timothy eventually learns, works for a large corporation called Baby Corp. Made up of hundreds of hardworking infants with adultlike subjectivities, Baby Corp’s mission is to ensure that a baby’s cuteness remains a top commodity. These adult-babies drink a secret serum that prevents them from growing up, underscoring their obsessive, needy desire to be an object of affection.
Despite being only ninety-eight minutes long, there’s a lot going on here. Timothy’s discovery that his younger brother is actually a Boss Baby leads him down a Pynchon-esque, conspiratorial rabbit hole, in which his parent’s company, Puppy Co, is battling it out with Baby Corp over who can have a monopoly on cuteness. Puppy Co’s cruel CEO, an ex-Boss Baby voiced by none other than Steve Buscemi, is hell-bent on stealing Baby Corp’s serum to create the perfect product — the “Forever Puppy.” Through a misadventure featuring Elvis impersonators, an evil henchman, and a corporate convention in Las Vegas, Timothy bonds with the Boss Baby and learns to come to terms with his new role as an older brother. Once the Boss Baby saves his company, he gets promoted, only to realize that being an upper-executive has nothing on love and intimacy. He dramatically rips off his “Boss” outfit and embraces just being a “Baby.”
Across Marxist discourse, a common point of contention is that love in all of its contemporary manifestations — family, marriage, monogamous relationships —merely perpetuates capitalism. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels traces how the modern notion of the family is intertwined with capitalism systems of inheritance and private property. In The Boss Baby, through the confines of the heterosexual bourgeois family, a humanist ideal of love is introduced. Power hungry entities like Baby Corp and Puppy Co are rendered villains, dogmatically trying to commodify something that’s enigmatic and unquantifiable.
The Boss Baby (DreamWorks Animation, 2017)
Computer animation, the film’s medium, not only colorfully illustrates Timothy’s vibrant fantasies, but also serves to hyperbolize and stretch this sinister notion that love can be commodified. The viewer is confronted with exaggerated forms of cuteness — the Boss Baby’s glistening wide eyes, tiny barking dogs, and the most obvious of them all, the “Forever Puppy,” a literal commodity based on the desire to accessorize love. While this imagery is adorable and enticing, it’s exposed to be a farce concocted by Trumpian CEOs and their subservient marketing teams. Most of the characters do extreme things because of their superficial understanding of affection: Timothy with his initial rejection of the Boss Baby, the infants at Baby Corp with their addiction to an anti-aging serum, and the CEO of Puppy Corp with his nihilist promotion of false products of love. The true lasting adorable moments, however, are a result of Timothy’s budding friendship with the Boss Baby. In the first half of the film, after the Boss Baby tells Timothy that he never had a family in a stern, detached manner, he falls asleep cuddling next to his new brother, slowly and subconsciously embracing his chance for human connection. Beneath the onslaught of absurdity is an underlying theme that love isn’t finite, love isn’t owned, and love isn’t property. Love, it seems, is learned.
During the film’s climax, the Boss Baby runs through Baby Corp realizing he actually wants to be part of Timothy’s family. Right before jumping into a tube that leads to the real world, he looks up at his office’s giant screen and sees a pie chart measuring the market’s demand for babies. Suddenly, the chart transforms into a thumping heart — the Boss Baby screams in ecstasy. Though the Boss Baby grows up to become a faceless businessman, the point of the film isn’t revolution but survival — an insistence that through relationships and bonds one can learn to relish in the surrealist absurdity of it all.
Terry Gross was right — congrats Alec Baldwin on The Boss Baby.
Author Biography
Daniel Spielberger graduated from Reed College, where he got a BA in History. He’s a writer interested in media studies, creative nonfiction, and Judaism. Check out his website. (www.danielspielberger.com).
Film Details
The Boss Baby (2017)
United States of America
Director Tom McGrath
Runtime 98 minutes
