By the time Jack gets back from Turkey, his friends are competent caretakers, but as Mary is officially, genetically his, force him to take over her care so they can get some rest. When Peter has the brilliant idea to ask his on/off girlfriend Rebecca for help “Because you’re a woman” she just laughs, tells him, “That doesn’t mean I automatically know what to do with babies,” and leaves for her date with another man.
And while it takes a female shop assistant to educate them about formula and their neighbor is able to magically get Mary to calm down just by holding her, other female characters call them out on their sexist expectations. It’s easy to dismiss their struggle to feed Mary, bathe her, and, of course, to get her diaper to stay up as attempting to show that men can’t cope with kids, but their incompetence isn’t gendered: anyone who’d never had a baby before would struggle with these things. In by far the least believable part of the story (even including the men’s self-styled drug “sting”), when doorstep baby Mary turns up the next day, with a note from Jack’s ex-fling Sylvia saying she can’t cope anymore, Peter and Michael accept that this is the package to which Jack was referring, and set about caring for her as best they can. Without explaining that he’ll be away filming a movie in Turkey, Jack agrees, mentioning it to Peter in passing and asking him to put it to one side until he gets back.
The movie then opens with a birthday party for Peter, who is turning “late thirties or forties”, at which Jack is cornered by a shifty-looking acquaintance who asks if he’ll take delivery of “a package” for him the next day. The credits did little to disabuse me that this was a movie about three overgrown adultescents: Gloria Estefan’s song “Bad Boy” (“bad, bad, bad, bad, boy, you make me feel so good”) plays while we see a revolving door of women coming in and out of the bachelor pad shared by Peter (Tom Selleck), Michael (Steve Guttenberg), and Jack (Ted Danson), who is the studliest of them all. There’s also a subplot involving heroin smuggling that makes the film more farcical and far less family-friendly than it otherwise would be. Of course, it has issues: there’s a marked lack of diversity, especially for something set in New York. Three Men and a Baby is a lot of fun, and more progressive than you might expect. I imagined it to be rife with gender stereotyping, goofy gags demonstrating that men can’t cope with babies, and jokes about the how “emasculating” being a father can be.
I loved the movie as a kid, but I dreaded re-watching it. Released in 1987, it was the first Walt Disney Studios production to gross over $100 million domestically, taking $168 million worldwide and making men with kids a hot proposition. Three Men and a Baby isn’t the first pop cultural example of a male primary caregiver, but it is arguably the most iconic and definitely one of the most successful.
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