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| Infertility comedy ‘Baby Mama’ fails to deliver | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Craig Outhier, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| April 24, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
“I just don’t like your uterus,” her fertility specialist (John Hodgman) quips. “It’s T-shaped.” Kate’s story — single, unfulfilled career woman, hungry for motherhood — has all the makings of a good seriocomic baby saga, but Fey and writer-director Michael McCullers aren’t too keen on the “serio” part. Instead, they pony up a reliably lightweight buddy movie, pairing Fey with longtime “Saturday Night Live” cohort Amy Poehler in an amnion of “Odd Couple”-style situational humor that, while full of modest laughs, fails to carry the movie to full, emotionally rounded term. The movie has some hilariously mischievous moments, particularly when McCullers (the “Undercover Brother” screenwriter, here making his directing debut) exploits Kate’s ordeal to satirize the phenomenon of modern-day reproductive baristas. When Kate — vice president of a Philly-based organic foods company — struts out of a sperm-donor facility with a no-drip canteen of baby batter, the implication is clear: She might as well be lugging a soy latte from Starbucks. When the sperm-donor method fails to produce results, Kate turns to a surrogate-mother headhunter (Sigourney Weaver, funny as a shameless “lifestyle” shill) and pays $100,000 to implant her inseminated eggs in Angie (Poehler), a sweet but trashy wannabe clothes designer with an opportunistic common-law husband (Dax Shepard) cut from the same ribbed-undershirt cloth as Kevin Federline. Though imperfectly cast as the young, semiliterate childbearing type, Poehler brings her substantial comic focus to bear on Angie, and owns the role. And when Angie leaves her husband and moves in with the control-freaky Kate, the two comedians are only too eager to de-mothball their finely-honed “SNL” rapport. It’s Kate’s prenatal vitamins vs. Angie’s Pringles, with karaoke duets of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to hasten the bonding. (Consequently, Greg Kinnear is an afterthought as Kate’s reformed-lawyer love interest, though Steve Martin and “Weeds” regular Romany Malco chip in sharp supporting performances as her spacey New Age boss and wisecracking doorman, respectively.) In her first bona fide leading lady role, Fey proves something of an enigma. With her bespectacled good looks, city-gal smarts and endearingly uptight energy, she recalls a “Baby Boom”-era Diane Keaton, but with a nagging self-consciousness that prevents Kate from assuming truly human form. She just doesn’t pop, in more ways than one. REVIEW ‘Baby Mama’Cast: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Michael McCullers Rating: PG-13 (crude and sexual humor, profanity and a drug reference), 96 minutes — Grade: B- Contact Craig Outhier by email, or phone (480) 898-5683 |
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