In Baby Boom we meet J.C. Wiatt (Diane Keaton), a Harvard M.B.A. who is on the fast track as a management consultant for a top New York corporation. She makes six figures a year and lives with Stephen (Harold Ramis), an investment banker. Looming on the horizon is a partnership firm. And then... Elizabeth arrives. She's a 13-month-old orphan bequeathed to J.C. in a distant cousin's will. The workaholic roommate quickly exits.
Baby Boom is a cute and humorous movie which lampoons the excesses of the Yuppie lifestyle. Keaton is very funny as the "tiger lady" who is declawed by little Elizabeth. Once she realizes that she can't maintain her high powered Manhattan career and be supermom at the same time, J.C. chucks her job and on an impulse purchases a 62-acre country home in Vermont. After months of loneliness and frustration, she discovers that her apple sauce can be marketed to her generation as "gourmet baby food." Then she meets a veterinarian (Sam Shepard) who helps her get in touch with that charming woman underneath her pushy exterior.
Director Charles Shyer and co-writer Nancy Meyers (Irreconcilable Differences) zap the warps of success-crazed young professionals and the extremes to which many Yuppie parents are going in order to insure that their children will be better and brighter than those produced by any previous generation. But in the last analysis, Baby Boom ends up peddling the biggest myth of all: it is possible to have money, power, personal fullfillment, children, freedom, life in the country away from the rat race, and a mate who is attractive, sensitive, and smart.