Baby Mama
You don’t have to uterus to enjoy this chick buddy flick, but maybe someone with one should have written it. Not that writer-director Michael McCullers (a “Saturday Night Live” writer) does a bad job- the film is a fun and sweet pregnancy comedy in all the ways Chris Columbus’ dreadful “Nine Months” wasn’t. But given the stigma of badness carried by many a film starring “SNL” alum, maybe producer Lorne Michaels should have let his bi-spectacled leading lady take a pass at this.
That leading lady is Tina Fey, the 37-year old hottie mom who was “SNL’s” first female head writer, and made a smart and sassy film debut as a writer with 2004’s sly “Mean Girls,” and is now the star and co-creator of NBC’s hit sitcom “30 Rock.” Every step of the way in this pregnancy comedy do you hope for a glimmer of that edge, to no avail. The film is hardly bereft of sharp laughs, but sap ultimately wins out.
If the film has one saving grace (although truth told it has several), however, it’s the dead-on chemistry between Fey as the supposedly-barren Kate and fellow “SNL”-er (and “Weekend Update” co-host) Amy Poehler as her surrogate “baby mama” Angie. Somehow, Angie and her equally-clueless “common law” husband Carl (Dax Shepherd) passed through the background check of surrogate mother “poster mom” Chaffee Bicknell (the delightfully sardonic Sigourney Weaver), even though she’s still capable of having kids the old-fashioned way (and we’re not talking about storks, people). But as Kate and Angie bond, Fey and Poehler recapture that spark they had on “SNL” with ease and inspiration. Of course, you have the requisite bumps along the way- especially when Fey’s VP of a health food grocery store (run by no less than a ponytailed Steve Martin, pulling off an oddball zen-master charm wonderfully) gets involved with a small business owner (an endearing Greg Kinnear) of a smoothie chain in the area they’re developing in, and Carl and Angie are on the outs about the arrangement- but both make you care about their characters, reveal their faults, and make you root for them to make the right call in the end.
“Baby Mama” is a lot like most comedies nowadays- isolated moments of big laughs and acute observations in between long stretches of complete predictability. As a vehicle for its’ two talented leads, there are worse possibilities (actually adapting an “SNL” skit, for example, rarely works), and the supporting cast (especially “40 Year-Old Virgin’s” Romany Malco as Kate’s doorman and Holland Taylor as yet another embarassing mother) does a lot of comedic heavy lifting. But Fey and Poehler (two of the smartest “SNL”-ers in choosing their off-“Live” projects) deserve better than just another chick flick. They do make it tolerable, though- a true sign of real talent.
