How to describe Ricki Lake without making any reference to her size? You wouldn't be allowed to say she is a ton o' fun or the barrel the monkeys came in. As the most rollicking component of John Waters' film "Hairspray," Lake made a gigantic impression on happy moviegoers everywhere. Oops, there we go again. Tonight Lake plays a fat girl with a heart of gold in "Babycakes," a marginally delightful CBS movie -- at 9 on Channel 9 -- based on the West German film "Sugarbaby." Predictably, the Americanized edition is much bouncier and less grim, and the unhappy ending has been changed to a happy one. But the story still works, and Lake -- though not as exuberantly liberated as in "Hairspray" -- is probably the main reason why. She plays Grace Johnson, a beautician in a Manhattan mortuary ("I've never had a dissatisfied customer") who doubles as organist at services. To a hot dog vendor serving up her lunch, Grace issues the fateful directive "Lots and lots of chili, please." The story of her life. Then she spies Rob (Craig Sheffer), a thin and handsome young subway trainman ice skating in the park, and vows to snare him, not by losing weight and becoming someone else, but by cooking him a meal that will stick to his ribs. When you've got them by the ribs, their hearts and minds may follow. Lake and Sheffer are, and have, a good deal of fun together. Naturally there are complications. Rob is entangled with a possessive yuppette who's conveniently out of town during Grace's seductive phase. Grace's uninterested widowed father (John Karlen) remarries, and the new wife (Betty Buckley) clearly doesn't like having Grace around. Because when Grace is around, Grace is around. As written by Joyce Eliason and directed by Paul Schneider, the story remains intriguing even when, alas, it replicates the bathos in the original film -- especially a lurid scene at a disco when Rob's girlfriend confronts Grace. Schneider completely botches a fanciful funeral attended by Asians, whom Grace cheers up with a chorus of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," in honor of the corpse. "Babycakes" doesn't prescribe fatness over fitness, but it makes the case that fatties can, and deserve to be, contented and fulfilled, and not just by the Hostess company. Grace has to endure such indignities as a snotty clerk at a clothing store ("I look like a two-story house," she mopes into the mirror) and patronizing remarks even from friends. Her best friend is the amusingly morbid Keri, played to worry-warted perfection by Nada Despotovich. She's the kind of person whose idea of small talk is "The planet is dying, you know" and who dreams of making love to Mikhail Gorbachev and Sigmund Freud, on separate nights, that is. Though the movie is set in New York, most of it was filmed in Toronto, which once again proves it is too neat and too clean to pass for the Big Apple. Fortunately, this is something of a fairy tale and grimy realism wouldn't help it a bit. Lake is glorious in triumph. "I just want to take this moment, put it in my pocket and keep it forever," she says at the height of her affair. "Babycakes" endorses and embodies the idea that even a little tiny bite of happiness can last a long, long time.
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