Movie Review: Baby Mama

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Baby Mama (2008)–*1/2

Let’s take a cue from Amy Poehler’s SNL Weekend Update bit titled Really?

Really, Amy? Really? You thought this gig in a tepid, tedious comedy was right for your first starring role? Really? That’s like saying heroin is the choice painkiller for you first experience with child birth. And really, Tina Fey? Really? Baby Mama, a second-rate little comedy about a 37-year-old business woman looking to be a mom, is really the film you want to make after lampooning the same character on 30 Rock for two years? Really?

From Fey, a Saturday Night Live alumna, and Poehler, the sketch comedy show’s current leading lady, comes a comedy that is unacceptably unfunny. Oh, true, like any mainstream comedy, Baby Mama has its moments of unsatisfying laughter, but there’s this suspicion that we’ve been hoodwinked. How can two comediennes the caliber of Fey and Poehler end up in a film that’s as edgy and smart as a JC Penny clothing model?

Fey plays Kate Holbrook, a business woman in her late-30s who has spent her life climbing the corporate ladder and not having babies. Her legacy is in the mega health food stores she helped develop in trendy neighborhoods across the country. One day she wakes up and decides to have a baby. Adoption isn’t an option. Her fertility doctor says he doesn’t like her uterus. Kate’s only real option is surrogacy.

The best jokes in Baby Mama come when Kate meets with Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver), the head of the surrogacy planning agency. “Chaffee Bicknell? I thought that was two people,” says Kate upon entering Chaffee’s office. It’s worth a solid chuckle. When Kate asks Chaffee if she’s going to outsource her pregnancy to a poor woman in the third world, and Chaffee writes down a note, we get a laugh line worthy of both Fey and Weaver.

Then Poehler enters the picture. Poehler plays Angie, the lower-class white woman from…ahem…a less affluent part of town. She’ll carry Kate’s baby. Poehler never really settles on making Angie a 100 percent comedic role or even a wholly sympathetic character, resulting in some terribly uneven comedic moments.

Fey, too, has trouble fitting into her role as Kate. She strains to be restrained and misses out on comedic gold. Moments where the class conflict could result in insightful belly laughs are turned into lines that are just, well, mean. Kate and Angie aren’t simply another odd couple, but the film settles on letting them be a mediocre Felix and Oscar.

By the end of the film, you kind of feel bad for Poehler and Fey. Instead of being in a film that was made for comedy fans, they’re stuck in a film made for the folks who watch Oprah. Sure, it may get the pair a wider audience then either one has ever seen, but the cost, losing comedic clout, may end up outweighing the benefit.

Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sigourney Weaver, Greg Kinnear, Steve Martin, Romany Malco and Dax Shepard, directed by Michael McCullers, is in theaters now.