Baby Mama

The clock is ticking for 37-year-old Kate (Tina Fey), a successful executive with an organic food company, but still single, and worse, cursed with an abnormal T shaped uterus. Her chances of conception are a million to one, her doctor says.

Adoption might be an option, but surrogacy (“outsourcing”) is quicker and more personal, she reckons. Maybe it also offers more comedic potential, though this middling effort from writer director Michael McCullers may not be the best proof of that.

It’s not entirely plausible that Kate would jump at the surrogate mom sent over by the agency. Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler) hardly seems an ideal candidate. A bubble-headed blonde with a doofus for a boyfriend, Carl (Dax Shepard), she’s just a short step up from trailer trash. But Kate’s desperate, and Angie seems amenable – so long as she doesn’t have to give up her junk food, booze, and cigarettes.

It’s no surprise when Angie breaks up with Carl and has to move in with her new “employer”. This is classic odd couple territory, albeit with a more pronounced class bias then we might usually see.

McCullers wrote the script specifically for Fey and her Saturday Night Live costar Poehler (a more familiar movie presence from films like Blades of Glory and Mr Woodcock). Best known in Britain for her own show, 30 Rock, Fey exudes a brainy sophistication and somewhat prim authority. Poehler is more loud and vulgar, a combination she imbues here with improbable sweetness, though at 36 she strikes me as too old for the part; a 21-year-old Lindsay Lohan type might have given the movie more juice, and added a few generation gap wrinkles to the girls’ relationship.

Fey is a bit stiff and awkward in places, but a welcome presence all the same, subtly sending up the sanctimonious, controlling side of a modern, do-it-all, twenty first century working mother-to-be, but not so as we lose respect for the character. It’s the kind of part Diane Keaton used to play so well, and before her, Katharine Hepburn: cosmopolitan and smart, but allowing a few cracks to show in the façade. If Fey can loosen up a little and show there is still an audience out there interested in laughing along with mature, intelligent women then Hollywood comedies might grow up a little.

McCullers creates a generous range of comic supporting characters, more than ably filled out by actors like Sigourney Weaver (very game as the outrageously fertile head of the surrogate agency, Chaffee Bicknell), Greg Kinnear (as Kate’s love interest), and in his funniest performance in years, Steve Martin, as Kate’s egregiously narcissistic, pony-tailed new agey boss, Barry. (To reward Kate for good work he gives her five minutes uninterrupted eye contact.)

McCullers also contrives one unexpected plot development and sprinkles the script with satiric asides – like Carl’s declaration to Angie, “If it’s a boy, I’ll marry you.”

With all this going for it, the movie should be funnier than it is. Perhaps the aches and pains of pregnancy have been done to death, or perhaps McCullers just goes soft on his characters, because the longer it goes on the longer the gaps get between laughs.

The movie’s sit-comfy style will probably work better at home on DVD. In the cinema, it starts well and peters out in a disappointing shrug.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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