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Much Drama in 'Baby Mama'

By Daniel Montgomery

Friday, April 25, 2008

“This is a mess,” says corporate-lawyer-turned-Jamba-Juice-hating-smoothie-maker Rob (Greg Kinnear) during a family court hearing; something has gone wrong when the screenplay is apologizing for itself mid-story. ‘Baby Mama’ isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s not a very good one either, which is a shame because it might have been a very good one, if only someone had had faith in the main story instead of piling two or three unnecessary ones on top of it.

Now I can only wonder where it went wrong. Was it writer-director Michael McCullers (writer of the ‘Austin Powers’ films) who, in the process of composing his script, thought he needed a character to be running a convoluted scam? Or was it the studio, who upon receiving McCullers’s draft decided, “You know what this needs — a DNA test, an idiot plot, and an unconvincing ending”? Perhaps the latter, if that court hearing is any indication. The scene doesn’t remotely work, and in the dialogue there’s the sense that even the movie doesn’t know how it got there or why. “That’s the worse closing argument I’ve ever heard,” says the judge (James Rebhorn) of Rob’s summation; no, actually, Rob is just describing the plot.

‘Baby Mama’ is built on a sturdy foundation. Rising star Tina Fey, a writer and actress who has earned comparisons to Mary Tyler Moore for her work on the TV comedy 30 Rock, plays Kate Holbrook, the vice president of an organic food company in Philadelphia whose biological clock is ticking. But her T-shaped uterus makes conception all but impossible, so she hires as a surrogate Angie, played by Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler. Supporting these very funny women is a cast that includes Kinnear, Sigourney Weaver, Maura Tierney, Holland Taylor, Denis O’Hare, Romany Malco, and Steve Martin. There are cameos from Fred Armisen and Will Forte (also of SNL), as well as John Hodgman from The Daily Show. If this talented cast had consulted on the screenplay, it might have solved everything.

The setup (the good one): Kate is fussy and work-oriented, and Angie is brash and uncouth. When Angie splits from her common-law husband, she moves in with Kate, and hilarity ensues. Well, hilarity might be a strong word for it; gags include a birthing instructor who speaks like a Barbara Walters parody from fifteen years ago. But Fey and Poehler are a winning pair, as demonstrated during a love scene of sorts where the implantation process, complete with stirrups and syringe, is given the full romantic treatment.

Where the story goes from there I won’t reveal, except to say that Kate meets Rob the smoothie maker and is smitten. But I’ve already mentioned a DNA test and a court hearing, so you can guess that the pregnancy doesn’t go as planned. How unwelcome it is when this amiable comedy switches to melodrama. How disappointing for the pleasing relationship between Kate and Rob to start going through the exhausted motions of romantic comedies. How dishonest an ending, which bends over backwards to deliver everyone their prescribed happy ending; it’s so tidy, it feels more like calculation than storytelling.

‘Baby Mama’ perhaps didn’t have the potential for greatness, but it contains elements of abundant goodness. Weaver as hyper-fertile surrogacy advocate Chaffee Bicknell is a hoot; there’s something cheerfully deranged about her surrogacy agency, where she must make a note of it when Kate explains she doesn’t want her child outsourced to a poor woman in the third world. Martin lays it on a little thick as Kate’s goofy, New-Age boss, but has an inspired scene where he “rewards” Kate with uninterrupted eye contact. As for Fey, she is an Emmy-winning writer and producer, the winner of multiple Writers Guild Awards and a nominee for her screenplay for the superior teen comedy ‘Mean Girls’. Now that she is coming to prominence in front of the camera, she may have been better off writing her own movie to star in.