Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. Given that truism, it’s easy to trace the lineage of Baby Mama back to today’s reigning queens of comedy, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
 Some things are better left to the stork: UVA grad Tina Fey (left) and Amy Poehler play the Gallant and Goofus of the maternity set in Baby Mama. |
Fey (former head writer of “Saturday Night Live” and current doyen of “30 Rock”) stars as Kate, a single businesswoman who has traded personal growth for professional success. Pushing the upper limits of her 30s and recently named vice president of a Whole Foods-like organic supermarket chain, Kate figures it’s high time she had it all and spawned a child—lack of a life partner be damned. Unwilling to wait the five years or so it would take to adopt, Kate opts for in vitro fertilization. Unfortunately, her uterus isn’t in on the plan, and Kate’s only option is a surrogate mother. She finds one in the form of white trash breeder Angie (Amy Poehler, another “SNL” vet who popped up recently alongside hubby Will Arnett in Blades of Glory). Angie agrees to keep Kate’s bun in her oven, but an untimely split with her moronic husband (Dax Shepard, appropriately slack-jawed) forces Angie to move into Kate’s upscale Philadelphia penthouse.
Most of Baby Mama’s humor derives from the Odd Couple-ish clash of lifestyles between uptight urban go-getter Kate and uncouth rural Twinkie-sucker Angie. As the pregnancy progresses, Kate tries to break Angie of her poor diet and bad personal habits, while Angie tries to get Kate to loosen her metaphorical tie just a notch.
| Trailer for Baby Mama. |
Fey and Poehler are both excellent comediennes with well-honed senses of timing. They play beautifully off each other, with Baby Mama’s witty, dialogue-driven script to back them up. The script is provided by Mike McCullers, who helped write the last two Austin Powers movies and spent a couple years in the “SNL” salt mines himself. The plot jumps through a few slightly contrived hoops trying to stretch its simple situation out to a full hour and a half, and the ending is far too tidy; still, both are pretty much par for the course in this genre. McCullers doesn’t provide much in the way of visual fireworks, directing the film like a garden variety sitcom. A more assured comedy helmer (Judd Apatow, to name the obvious candidate) might have given things a bit more oomph, but the film we’ve got is relatively free of flaws.
The supporting cast is surprisingly strong, with Greg Kinnear on hand to provide Kate’s possible love interest, Sigourney Weaver flexing her Working Girl comedy muscles as a ridiculously fertile fertility specialist and Steve Martin scoring his first genuine laughs in a dog’s age as a hippie-dippy corporate mogul.
The draw, though, is the smart, funny and fresh work of Fey and Poehler—both of whom deserve more roles and bigger paychecks in the aftermath of this likable laugher. If it taps into the same sort of receptive audience that Baby Boom did back in ’87, Baby Mama could give birth to a sizable springtime hit.
