The trials and tribulations of cinematic couples trying to conceive tend to be a lot like home movies: endlessly fascinating to those involved, boring for everyone else. That's certainly the case with Maybe Baby, an alternately grating and listless conception-themed comedy/drama. The brainchild of comedian, novelist, and TV regular Ben Elton (who adapted his own novel, Inconceivable), the film stars Hugh Laurie as an acerbic writer who works for British television but longs to break into film. Struggling with a terrible case of writer's block, Laurie finds much-needed inspiration in his and wife Joely Richardson's frustrated attempts to conceive. He dashes off a screenplay based on their experiences, but attempts to hide it from Richardson, partially out of fear that she'll realize he's been using material lifted from her diary. Of course, Laurie's screenplay is snapped up immediately by the BBC—not coincidentally, the folks behind Maybe Baby—but even if Maybe Baby's final third didn't center on a film-within-a-film based on Laurie and Richardson's life, it would still feel self-indulgent and self-satisfied. As it is, Elton adds layer upon layer of reflexivity until the film collapses into a schizoid orgy of fruitless navel-gazing. A writing veteran of such beloved cult series as Blackadder, The Young Ones, and Mr. Bean, Elton scores early laughs at the expense of the Trainspotting-derived school of sordid shock, but otherwise his satirical aim is shockingly off. His screenplay veers clumsily from slapstick to scatology to sentimentality and back again, while his stiff visual sensibility betrays his background in television. Rowan Atkinson and Emma Thompson turn in distractingly showy cameos, while Laurie flounders in a charming-cad role better suited to Hugh Grant. Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of Maybe Baby is how a film that's so obviously derived from Elton's life can end up feeling so phony.