Fetus In Slack-Jawed Yokel | Amy Poehler is Tina Fey’s white-trash surrogate mom in Baby Mama.
BABY MAMA
Directed by Michael McCullers. Starring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Steve Martin. Now playing.
2 stars
Baby Mama is one of those comedies where you get the feeling that the only funny moments are one-liners and offhand character bits that the actors sneaked in on their own—would this make them surrogate gag-writers?
The chief smuggler here is the brilliant comic Amy Poehler, in what I believe is her first above-the-title starring role: the role of Angie Ostrowski, a none-too-bright unemployed woman who agrees to be the surrogate mother for infertile corporate VP Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey), doesn’t have much of a centre, but Poehler doodles some amusing comic business around its edges.
There’s a great little moment, for instance, in the scene where Kate drives the newly inseminated Angie back to her house: I love the hilariously insincere way Poehler pretends to search her pockets for some money to pay for her share of the gas. And Poehler finds an oddly sweet, humanizing moment in the scene where Angie’s water breaks: she looks back over her shoulder at the mess she’s made on the sidewalk and guiltily asks Kate if they should do something to clean it up.
Steve Martin (playing Fey’s boss, a fatuous organic-food tycoon with a long, grey ponytail) and Sigourney Weaver (as the condescending owner of an upscale surrogacy clinic, still terrifyingly fertile well into her 50s) contribute some amusing supporting bits, but they barely register under the sound of Baby Mama creaking along from one telegraphed plot turn to the next.
So few comedies come out of Hollywood with two women in their 30s sharing the leads, so it’s amazing how Baby Mama still manages to seem completely conventional and familiar, from the opening scene of Kate scaring away a date by talking nonstop about wanting to have a baby, to the dishonest final plot twist, which I can only describe as a fetus ex machina.
Maybe Baby Mama wouldn’t seem quite so disappointing if it starred someone other than Tina Fey, whose TV sitcom 30 Rock is so fast, so funny, and so sharp about how it feels for a smart woman in her late 30s to still be trolling the dating scene. The episodes in which Fey’s character can’t seem to avoid falling back into her relationship with a crass beeper salesman pack more class-conflict humour into 22 minutes than Baby Mama manages in more than quadruple the running time.
Lots of comedy could be mined from the idea of Kate’s entitled, touchy-feely upper-income notions about motherhood—all mommy-yoga classes and language-instruction CDs—colliding with Angie’s considerably less New Agey approach. (When Kate give Angie a glass of water to drink instead of her usual Red Bull, Angie spits it out immediately: “What is that?” she exclaims, genuinely appalled by what she’s tasting. “It’s horrible!”)
But writer/director Michael McCullers—who also co-wrote two of the Austin Powers movies—is weirdly unwilling to ask himself what kinds of arguments these two women might actually have with each other in this strange situation. He goes to the trouble of giving Kate a bitchy WASP mom (Holland Taylor) and a more understanding sister (Maura Tierney), but except for one rushed scene, never actually has them interact with the uncouth Angie.
Halfway through the film—read no further if you fear plot spoilers—McCullers reveals that Angie has been faking her pregnancy the whole time, an annoying revelation that pretty much derails the film for good. The last quarter of Baby Mama is total hackwork: there’s a musical montage; there’s a freaking-out-on-the-way-to-the-hospital routine, even a climactic courtroom scene—always a sign of desperation in any comedy script.
And through it all, Tina Fey puts on a game face, even though she must be wondering what she’s doing in a part that might as well have gone to Teri Hatcher. Blergh.
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