Baby, It's You Reviews

Another fascinating but somewhat flawed work from the fertile pen and camera of John Sayles, BABY, IT'S YOU concerns an attractive high schooler named Jill (Rosanna Arquette), whose intelligence is sometimes overwhelmed by her naivete. She meets up with "Sheik" (Vinent Spano), a would-be Lothario who hangs around the school but doesn't seem to take classes. Sheik, an Italian kid who worships Sinatra, has a roughhewn kind of charm, but his working-class background doesn't mesh with Jill's white-bread worldview. The story wends from New Jersey to Florida as it covers the affair between this unlikely couple. BABY, IT'S YOU feels more like a pastiche than a plot, a series of dots looking for lines to connect it. Although it takes place in the middle to late 1960s, some Bruce Springsteen music--anachronistic but ideally reflective of New Jersey blue-collar culture--has been smuggled into the score to interesting effect. Sayles's class-consciousness is telling as always, and the director is so good at creating complex, persuasive characters that one is tempted to overlook narrative weaknesses, especially in the final third of the film.