Baby Mama: Movie Review (2008)

Written and directed by Michael McCullers, 96 minutes, rated PG-13.

The new Michael McCullers movie, “Baby Mama,” goes down like a tall bottle of warm Similac. And that’s a good thing.

Based on McCullers script and set in Philadelphia, the film stars Tina Fey as Kate Holbrook, a successful, 37-year-old business woman who’s living the high life, albeit with a bum womb.

Apparently, her womb is T-shaped, which pretty much spells trouble since single Kate is finding it impossible to get pregnant in spite of repeated efforts at artificial insemination.

At the start of the movie, her doctor tells her she has a “one in a million chance” of conceiving, so Kate does what any resourceful individual would do--she decides to look into adoption agencies, which curiously won’t have anything to do with her, and then she chooses another route, one that ultimately changes her life.

She goes to an agency that specializes in connecting people like her to surrogate mothers like Angie (Amy Poehler). The agency is run by the unusually fertile Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver, very funny in a role that finds her smiling gracefully through an onslaught of old-age jokes), who apparently can get pregnant at the drop of a wink. What Chaffee devises for these two women will mean tens of thousands of dollars to Angie, the same to Chaffee, and a child for Kate, who wants a baby more than anything.

But at what cost? For Kate, it turns out to be higher than expected, particularly since Angie isn’t exactly the cultured woman Chaffee promised. Instead, she’s a crude, combative mess, the sort of person not above relieving herself in the bathroom sink if the toilet happens to be unavailable.

When Angie decides to dump her common-law husband, Carl (Dax Shepard), she moves in with Kate, which allows the two to bond, argue, go to nightclubs and enjoy bouts of karaoke even while a major twist brims on the periphery.

Though the movie never reaches its full comedic potential--it’s too nice and too safe to really dig in and go for the bigger, rowdier laughs--it’s still fun. A good deal of this is because of the chemistry shared between Fey and Poehler, whose years of working together on “Saturday Night Live” allowed them to perfect their shtick to the point that it eclipses the movie’s shortcomings (specifically, its shoddy direction).

Lifting the movie higher is Steve Martin as Kate’s boss, a pony-tailed phony who has made millions in the whole foods movement; the actor hasn’t been this loose in years, likely because the film’s success doesn’t fully rest on him. Greg Kinnear is stuck with the least-interesting role as Kate’s dull love interest and he fares less well, though Romany Malco as Kate’s doorman does have a go of it in a part that could have been equally as forgettable. Here, it isn’t. His best scenes are shared opposite Poehler, the film’s true star, whose manic energy and cagey reactions go a long way in making this “Baby” work as well as it does.

Grade: B

View the trailer below: