A Boatload of Bakers Means Bushels of Baloney in Cheaper By the Dozen

Remakes seem to be rampant in theaters lately. One of the many to hit the big screen in the past decade was Cheaper By the Dozen, a remake of a 1950 classic that I never saw. As a fan of Steve Martin and Smallville’s Tom Welling, I’d wanted to check it out for a while, despite the high probability of cheesiness. I can’t make comparisons with the original, but now that I finally got around to seeing it, I liked it better than I expected. Is it corny? Yes. But I also found it funny and touching.

Tom Baker (Martin) is a small-time coach with a great big dream: to coach college football at his alma mater in Chicago. His wife Kate (Bonnie Hunt) has pretty big dreams too: writing and publishing a book. Both of these dreams have a shot at becoming a reality at once, which might be cause for excitement alone in an ordinary family. But this is no ordinary family. No, the Baker brood includes 12 children, 11 of whom still live at home. With Mom headed off to New York City to kick off a major book tour and Dad gearing up for what he hopes will be a winning season, who is going to keep an eye on a house full of rambunctious kids resentful that they had to leave their farmhouse home for life in the big city?

The movie does a decent job differentiating the characters, though some of them still blend together for me. In many cases, it doesn’t much matter who’s who; we just have rapid-fire chaos, some of which is funny, some of which is just cringe-inducing as one disaster follows another. Of the 12, about half are more a part of the collective than really interesting stand-alone characters. These include twins Nigel and Kyle (Brent and Shane Kinsman), the energetic youngest of the clan; Mike (Blake Woodruff), their slightly older brother; twins Kim and Jessica (Morgan York and Liliana Mumy); and their brother Jake (Jacob Smith). Generally, they just add to the cacophony of the household without standing out too much as individuals.

The rest are more well-defined. Nora (Piper Perabo), the oldest at 22, lives in Chicago with her boyfriend, a dopey, egotistical aspiring actor played by Ashton Kutcher in typical obnoxious mode. While I started out feeling sorry for him, especially after the kids play a prank on him that is both crude and dangerous, it wasn’t long before I found him as unlikable as the rest of the Bakers do. Nora herself is fairly sweet but torn between loyalty to her family and devotion to her boyfriend. I was a little disappointed not to connect much to Welling’s character, angsty senior Charlie, who spends most of his time being sulky and sarcastic, though I did feel for him as he bemoaned the fact that he and his girlfriend would now be hours away from each other.

Hillary Duff starts out in full-on bratty teenager mode as Lorraine, a fashion-conscious high schooler, but she gradually becomes more likable as she sticks up for her siblings in trying situations. Henry (Kevin G. Schmidt) is a rough-and-tumble bully type, while devious Sarah (Alyson Stoner) is smart-mouthed and always has some sort of devilish plan up her sleeve. Kate seems to have everything pretty well organized so that the kids mostly stay out of each other’s way and disasters are kept to a minimum, but Tom can’t quite hack it. I love watching Martin in goofball dad mode, though as his stress increases over the course of the movie, his parenting skills suffer greatly.

My favorite Baker is Mark (Forrest Landis), a delicate, bespectacled child who is accident-prone and lonely. Subjected to a humiliating nickname that alludes to what an oddball he is within his own family, he seeks solace in his pet toad and the gorgeous tower room he manages to snag for himself in their Victorian mansion. Of the several sub-plots running throughout the movie, I found Mark’s the most compelling as he battles his insecurities and isolation and tries to figure out just how he fits in, and I was gratified to see that his journey is ultimately what brings together several of those loose threads and takes us to the movie’s most moving moment.

Yes, some of the kids’ hijinks get a little old. I’ve never been a big fan of destroy-the-house-style comedy, and we definitely get a fair bit of that here. The running gag with a falling chandelier is pretty tired by the time it’s run its course, though I suppose there is something inherently amusing about watching Wayne Knight fall off a ladder. The Bakers’ new neighbor Tina (Paula Marshall) is pretty hard to take with her shrill over-protectiveness, though I found her easy-going husband (Alan Ruck) and son Dylan (Steven Anthony Lawrence), who is extremely sheltered and longs for some excitement, pretty likable. The movie is heavy on the slapstick and the sap, but I didn’t mind the latter and the former wasn’t enough to turn me off of the movie. On the whole, I enjoyed this chronicle of one big sometimes-happy family trying to have it all. In fact, the sequel is already in my queue.