Web posted on:
Wednesday, February 10, 1999 4:51:20 PM EST

From Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Nancy Savoca's hectoring new film "The 24-Hour Woman," which stars Rosie Perez as a daytime television producer who blows a fuse when she attempts to juggle her job with raising a baby girl, is very possibly the single most irritating movie I've ever had to review. That's not the same as saying that it's inept or that it panders to the lowest common denominator (although, to some degree, it's guilty on both counts); and it's certainly not the worst movie I've ever seen.

I'm just saying that it drove me up a wall, then proceeded to push me even further than that. The management of the theater nearly had to get a ladder and pull me off the ceiling when it was over. Suffice it to say that I actually trekked to the restroom at one point to wash my hands, just to get away from the screeching for a few minutes.

Savoca seems to think that she's making some deep feminist statement here when all she's doing is proving how annoying it is to listen to anxious people bicker with each other ... that is, when she isn't proving how annoying it is to listen to a baby cry.

Perez's co-workers (especially Patti LuPone as her mouthy boss) jabber endlessly and simultaneously, usually in groups of three or more, as they try to concoct a vacuous morning show that'll send them to the top of the Nielsen ratings. After a while the tone grew absolutely torturous, so it makes sense that the majority of the dialogue would be delivered by Perez, a woman with a voice that could fingernail its way through a titanium blackboard.

What this thing really is is a drastically retooled version of "Baby Boom," the 1987 Diane Keaton hit. That one's no great shakes either, and it's a whole lot less than realistic, but at least you can find something to like about the characters. Perez eventually passes through the fire and comes to a new awareness about herself, of course, but her put-upon producer -- a person who we're supposed to be rooting for -- seems perpetually ready to bitch-slap somebody.

Her husband (played by the super-hunky and extremely dull Diego Serrano) is co-host of the talk show (it's called "The 24-Hour Woman"), along with former MTV talking head Karen Duffy. She goes at it, too, shouting and hopping around the set of the show as if she puts away an 8-ball of coke every morning before she gets to the office. I always liked Duffy during her MTV gig, but as an actress she simply flashes her eyes and shouts like a cheerleader rather than trying to develop a real character.

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A lot of that can be blamed on the fact that virtually every time we see her she's trying to egg her TV audience into womanly hysteria, but even Savoca's jabs at the vacuousness of daytime TV come off all wrong.

Yeah, there's Jerry Springer and all that stuff, but the kind of show that Perez is supposed to be working on (it gets picked up by CBS at one point) is usually just vapid rather than this vigorously idiotic. And we get a couple million cuts to the tube, too, the better to giggle at how superior we all are to its shenanigans. I mean, yeah, I'd like to think that a lot of us are a bit further reaching than Leeza Gibbons, but I got the idea after the first 500 jokes! In the end, the overkill defeats itself by just making you feel dumb for sitting there and watching it.

The movie mostly consists of three different scenes that get repeated at varying degrees of shrillness: Rosie has a meltdown at work; Rosie has a meltdown over her uncaring husband; Rosie has a meltdown over the crying baby. Word is already getting out that you're supposed to have a child of your own in order to get the humor of what's going on here, but it doesn't take a lot of insight to know that a baby can run you ragged.

(I don't remember who told me, but I've also heard that working a full-time job can be stressful, too.) So I guess you're supposed to be getting some kind of "I Am Woman" vibe off of it; a vibe that I'd accept in a second if the emphasis wasn't so consistently placed on the "hear me roar" part of the equation.

As bad as LuPone, Serrano, and Duffy are, Perez is sometimes almost a relief. The real acting lifeline, however, belongs to Marianne Jean-Baptiste (the black woman who searches for her white mother in "Secrets and Lies") as a mother of three who's getting back into the TV industry so that she and her husband won't lose their home and their dignity.

She deserves much, much better roles than this, but Jean-Baptiste is like the calm at the eye of the storm ... that is, until she gets home. Then we find out, apparently much to Savoca's amazement, that 9-year-olds moan and carry on just as much as newborns. I don't know what she was shooting for when she started, but Savoca ended up with a documentary about the resiliency of human vocal cords.

The arguing in "The 24 Hour Woman" might rattle some of your fillings loose if you're not careful. The parts with the baby are obvious, and the stabs at pop cultural dissection look to have been concocted by someone who doesn't actually have a television set. Some bad language, and one scene shows Perez feeding her baby the way God intended. Rated PG-13. 110 minutes.