Rating: 3 Pulses
Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard
Directed by Michael McCullers
Rated PG-13
Baby Mama is the latest surrogate mother comedy in which the dramatic aspects of being pregnant with someone else’s baby are humorously explored.
Tina Fey plays Kate Holbrook, a single 37-year-old Vice President of a Whole Foods facsimile whose baby clock is ticking. Unfortunately, her T-shaped uterus renders her infertile. Desperate and seeing babies everywhere, Kate appeals to the more creepy than funny Sigourney Weaver playing the perpetually pregnant proprietor of an upscale fetal storage facility. Enter Amy Poehler and Dax Shepard as Angie and Carl, the white trash answer to Kate’s white collar dilemma.
What becomes of this clash of cultures makes up the bulk of this surprisingly by-the-books romantic comedy. The film begins with Kate explaining her case, the necessary exposition that ought to be bearable if it weren’t for so many comedic missteps. Generally I find Tina Fey to be quite funny. Here, however, her voice is mostly lost playing the character of an uptight workaholic with babies on the brain, leaving little room for the trademark Tina Fey persona to shine through.
Amy Poehler, however, seems to be given free reign in playing the neurotic, pop-culture obsessed firecracker Angie. Poehler’s sense of humor is a welcome and prominent contribution to the overall success of this film. As her common-law husband Carl, Shepard also does his part to save this movie from being just another stale chick-flick, despite the myriad indications otherwise.
The score, for one, is typical romantic comedy fare. When Greg Kinnear’s bland boy-type goes in for a kiss from Kate, the seriousness of the faint strings swelling over a tinkling piano seems nauseatingly out of place for a film featuring such off-beat scenes as an embryo-transfer-as-love-making montage.
Seemingly at home in this Lorne Michaels-laden film is Steve Martin in a recurring role as Kate’s boss doing his best impression of Tim Robbins’ Ian from High Fidelity. Disappointingly though, his best, like much of the film, leaves something to be desired. As the title indicates, the real star of this show is Kate’s baby mama, Angie, and had it not been for Poehler’s endearing insanity, I might have completely written this movie off.
