The Boss Baby: Family Business (2021)
Socialism Studies
The other day, Twitter informed me that it is improper to review a sequel if I haven’t seen the film that preceded it.
I’m of two minds on that.
On one hand, sure, it’s unfair to judge a story by its second half (or ninth-ninth, in the case of another franchise I might mention). Context is key, and it’s entirely possible that an audience member’s questions about character motivations, plot developments, or themes were answered in the movie they haven’t yet watched.
On the other hand, I also believe that movies should stand on their own, at least to some degree. If a screenwriter and director can’t be bothered to bring us newbies up to speed as to why their continuation is important, chances are I won’t bother to care; at that point, the sequel becomes “just a movie”, as opposed to what Scorsese might call “cinema”.
Not that every film has to be Mean Streets, but the gap quickly becomes a rabbit hole of an argument about the difference between film as an art form and film as a strictly commercial product. I wouldn’t be so cruel as to say to a filmmaker that they’d wasted years of their life on something that’s as memorable to moviegoers as their nine-hundredth candy bar, but I’d sure think it.
This is all to say that I’m about to review The Boss Baby: Family Business without ever having seen The Boss Baby.
What a mistake.
Writers Marla Frazee and Michael McCullers and director Tom McGrath assume that everyone has seen their Oscar-nominated 2017 hit, dropping us off right in the middle of the Templeton family’s ongoing adventures with Baby Corp.
What’s Baby Corp? I’m not entirely sure, except that it’s some kind of nether realm organization run by infants that can influence what we call “reality”.
Tim Templeton (voiced by James Marsden) is a stay-at-home dad who’s estranged from his younger gajillionaire brother, Theodore (Alec Baldwin)—even though they’d already been through some kind of Baby Corp ordeal in the first movie. Tim also struggles to relate to his eldest daughter, Tabitha (Arianna Greenblatt), and to maintain some semblance of control over baby Tina (Amy Sedaris). These personal obstacles are made more difficult by TIm’s overactive imagination, which blends fantasy with reality in a hyperkinetic melange of animated frenzy, practically from start to finish.
There’s so much going on here that to review the entire plot Tardis (six hours of content crammed into an hour and forty-seven minutes) would be as exhausting as my preamble about sequels. So I’ll zero in on the one aspect that makes this a contender for a personal 2021 favorite.
Early in the story, Tim and Theodore drink some magical baby formula, which reverts their bodies to much younger ages. Theodore once again becomes the “Boss Baby”, while Tim gets trapped as his middle-school self. Their mission is to infiltrate Tabitha’s new school, which Baby Corp believes poses an existential threat to mankind. They are aided by new “Boss Baby” Tina, who does her best to conceal her father’s and uncle’s identities from both Tabitha and Mrs. Templeton (Carol, voiced by Eva Longoria).
The school in question is Acorn Academy, a hyper-Progressive institution run by the super-smart and ultra-eccentric Dr. Armstrong (Jeff Goldblum). Packed with cutting-edge technology and emphasizing causes like environmental activism over creativity and play, Acorn is the kind of place that turns out mini-adult ideologues rather than smarter kids.
For spoiler-y reasons I won’t get into here, Armstrong is determined to turn all of his students against their parents, whom he sees as having jeopardized the next generation’s future. He wants kids to rule the planet, and plans to narcotize the grown-ups through an app that will forever absorb their attention (shades of Terminator: Genisys).
Because this isn’t a Christopher Nolan film, you can guess that Tim, Theodore, Tabitha, and Tina foil Armstrong’s plans in spectacular sugar-bomb fashion. What I could not have predicted was the wild social commentary lurking just beneath the surface of Dreamworks Animation’s counter to the Disney brand of family-wrecking entertainment.
The key difference is the fact that the family remains intact from the beginning of the film through the end. No dead parents. No absent parents. No rocky marriage. Despite lots of drama in the Templeton household, there’s simply no breaking their bond. That may sound unbelievably corny, especially as this oddly timed Christmas movie ends with a heartwarming snowball fight. But for the longest time, the cliche in family films has been dysfunction, death, and divorce. One could argue that this trend reflects the society that they’re meant to entertain, but it’s refreshing to see a film return to aspirational storytelling—to the fantasy that has, sadly, become a reality for far too many: an imperfect but loving nuclear family.
Dr. Armstrong and his legions of snobby, competitive, elitist students represent a real threat to the Templetons, and to the thousands of families living outside the Acorn bubble (one might as well call it Twitter Academy). They dream of overturning established rules and institutions in favor of policies that they haven’t quite figured out yet, but which simply must work because their cause is righteous.
Hell, with his oversized glasses, crazy white hair, and protestations against everything establishment, Armstrong is an on-the-nose Bernie Sanders stand-in.
For the first hour of Family Business, I wasn’t quite sure where the filmmakers landed on the arguments they were laying out. It seemed as though the movie was headed down the same tired path that mass-market entertainment has been trodding for the last half-decade—with its cartoonish over-emphasis on women and girls’ achievements at the expense of their doddering male counterparts (even the way Tim’s stay-at-home-dad character is coded feels more Rachel Maddow than Tony Danza, while Carol is cheered on as the she-can-have-it-all head of household); as well as the idea that the institutions that govern society are inherently flawed and can only be fixed by a rampaging, emotional mob of literal children.
Through all the gorgeously rendered but impossible-to-keep-up-with ADD animation, McGrath and company deliver lovely messages that are outrageously subversive in their total lack of hipness: Sometimes the status quo is the way to go. Sometimes families do stick together and solve problems when their individual talents become unified strengths (The Incredibles may as well have come out a hundred years ago).
Not that norms are above critique, improvement, and maybe even change via proper channels, but there’s a reason we refer to wisdom as belonging to “the adults in the room”. Promises of bottomless candy, endless freedom, and ceaseless affirmations are, well, kids’ stuff.
I’ll never watch Family Business again. I hesitate to recommend it to the uninitiated (like me). And I have very little interest in watching the original. But it’s nice to know there’s at least one movie out there ready to tell the Misanthropic Mouse House who’s boss.
