by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a Lifetime
TV-movie that had its “world premiere” last night, The Pregnancy Project, not to be confused with the recent The
Pregnancy Pact though it too, at least
ostensibly, is based on a true story that actually broke just last year, when
in April 2011 a high-school senior in Toppenish, Washington named Gaby
Rodriguez revealed at a school assembly that for most of the school year she
had been faking being pregnant as part of a student project to document how her
family, teachers and fellow students would treat her differently. The movie,
directed by Norman Buckley from a script by Teena Booth, comes off as a sort of
modern-day version of Gentleman’s Agreement, only instead of an adult male reporter pretending
to be Jewish to get a series of articles on anti-Semitic prejudice, it’s a
teenage girl pretending to be pregnant and ending up documenting a world of
social and racial (racist) stereotypes. It’s the sort of movie that starts out
being almost unwittingly silly but gets stronger and more emotionally intense
as it winds on, thanks to Buckley’s understated direction and some quite good
performances, notably by Alexa Vega as Gaby and especially by Laci J. Mailey as Tyra, the foster child whose
actual pregnancy inspired Gaby’s “project.”
The film comes with a lot of
heavy-duty baggage on the Lifetime Web site, including a downloadable two-page
“discussion guide” for use of this movie in schools, but aside from the social
intent of its makers (to prevent teenagers from having sex, or at least to
persuade them to use “protection” — though, intriguingly, birth control for
girls is not mentioned as an option
even once and, in line with the way
the AIDS scare has reshaped sexual morality, the onus of preventing teen
pregnancy is put on the males to use condoms), but on the whole it’s a well-done movie that explores
not only the clash between sexual responsibilities and hormonal drives but also
the ethics of unknowingly involving other human beings in a research project
and putting them through emotional changes for the sake of knowledge. One of
the more powerful parts of the story is that Gaby herself is the result of her
mother’s teen pregnancy, and her sister Sonya (Mercedes de la Zerda) was also a
teen mom — and her uncle Javier (Michael Mando) is fiercely judgmental of Gaby
and her boyfriend Jorge (Walter Perez) even before her (supposed) pregnancy, and afterwards they
nearly come to blows over Jorge’s (whose name, incidentally, is pronounced
“George,” Anglo-style, even by the Latino/a characters) knocking up his niece
and thereby allegedly ruining her life, driving her off the college-bound track
her general smarts and good grades had put her on and sticking her in the same
proletarian existence as her own, her sister’s and Jorge’s families.
Gaby finds
her reputation at school plummeting even farther and faster than she expected —
and a lot of the attacks on her are explicitly racist, including references to
“those people” and one fellow student
calling her entire family a “baby factory” — while Tyra thinks Gaby is
(relatively) lucky because at least Jorge is still part of her life, whereas
Devon, the father of Tyra’s unborn child, just walked out on her (as Gaby’s own
father did on her mom way back when). There’s also an effectively done suspense
element in whether or not Gaby’s secret will come out before her big “reveal” —
the only people who actually know are her mom, Jorge (there’s a nicely sour bit
of dialogue from him when he asks her, “Just when are we supposed to have this pretend ‘baby’?” — it’s clear he’s not
thrilled to have all the stigma of teen fatherhood and none of the joys of
unprotected sex with his girlfriend!), the two teachers who are advising her on
the assignment and her friend Claire (Sarah Smyth), whom she’s enlisted as her
research assistant to document what gets said about her out of her presence — and it’s also fascinating how
the strains of a pretend “pregnancy” and the traumas Gaby faces trying to keep
both her composure and her cover at least temporarily break up her and Jorge.
About
the only comic relief in the film is the scene in which Gaby and her mom cut a
basketball in half to make a faintly convincing false belly for her to make her
look pregnant (though at the
big “reveal” she lifts her shirt and what she’s actually wearing under it is a
professionally made medical appliance), and one sequence in which she’s trying
on a prom dress and is worried that if she buys one made for a non-pregnant
figure, that will “out” her. It’s a
neatly done movie, though just how close to the facts it is I have no idea
(Gaby herself wrote a memoir which is one of the books listed in the
“discussion guide”), and it was a bit disappointing from an aesthetic point of
view that the hottest-looking young man in the movie, Aaron (Richard Harmon),
was also one of the nastiest in terms of the catty comments he made about Gaby
and the sorts of girls who “let” themselves get pregnant in the first place.
