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At the start of Nancy Savoca’s scattershot but sometimes incisive The 24-Hour Woman (1999), a morning-TV producer named Grace (Rosie Perez) discovers she’s pregnant. Before she can process the news, she’s off to work — a job of such high and constant adrenaline that child-rearing becomes but another high-stress thing to add to her overpacked calendar. The movie covers about two years in Grace’s life: the entirety of her pregnancy — during which the bosses on the show she works on, which shares the title of the movie, push her into the spotlight with a surprisingly mega-popular segment tracking her pregnancy’s progress — up until her baby girl’s first birthday.

The 24-Hour Woman has good ideas and some astute observations in it. Its main point of frustration is how ill-equipped many industries are at satisfactorily supporting pregnant employees and employees in need of childcare, and how those failings can in turn lead new and experienced parents alike to look at themselves as inadequate. (You sense, watching the film, that Savoca has endured a lot of what Grace has herself.) The roundly strong performances have an elevating quality, too. Especially during the part of the film where Grace struggles to reacclimatize to her postpartum professional responsibilities, Perez does some of her best work. And Marianne Jean-Baptiste, as her new assistant who is also returning to the workforce after some time away to focus on motherhood, is warm and knowing as a woman trying to maintain her cool as she’s yanked around by her underappreciative bosses and her increasingly impatient stay-at-home husband (Wendell Pierce). 

But all this fitful goodness is packaged in an unruly movie that swings clumsily from screwball comedy to naturalistic drama to TV-industry satire. The 24-Hour Woman never finds a genre identity that fits. The movie also spends a lot of time focusing in on just the Jean-Baptiste character and her own struggles with professional readjustment, but Savoca never fully commits to making her an equal player to Grace. I think that’s a mistake — this character has a richness, probably in part because Jean-Baptiste is the kind of actress that finds a profundity even in small details, that Grace doesn’t always have. At her most frazzled, the latter can slope toward caricature. 

The mix of tones and busy storytelling modes never congeal; the first act particularly has a feeling of being fast-forwarded through. The 24-Hour Woman’s feelings of disarray reach their peak near its end, when we get a finale so extravagantly illogical that I thought for sure I’d only endure a few more minutes of it before an “it was all just a dream” reveal. (It never comes.) Still, I admired what The 24-Hour Woman looks to accomplish. And I can appreciate any movie that turns something so mundanely familiar — hustling home after work, with errands placing an unwanted lag on everything, to make it on time for your kid’s birthday party — into something as suspenseful and high-stakes as any race-against-the-clock action sequence.