The Boss Baby

Are your children asking how babies get made? Would you prefer to never answer them, ever? Then forestall the inevitable and ruin your kids’ weekend with The Boss Baby, an unsettling talking-infant farce that doubles as an unsettling Pop Capitalist saga for the age of the corporate citizen. As the opening credits play over Irvin Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” we’re up above the clouds, where babies roll off an assembly line, like cheap toys and bland animated features. Most of the babies pinball down an industrial chute to Earth, where they’ll presumably join a happy family and start watching Minions. But a select few lucky babies are selected for “management.” They get a suit, a briefcase, a cubicle, a title.

They go to work for BabyCorp, a company that has successfully quantified all the available love in the world, with a design aesthetic that equally suggests the midcentury banality of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and the late-century banality of Dilbert. At BabyCorp, employees dream of a corner office, with a big window and a tall desk, no family to distract them, no life to bother living.