Tina Fey (30 Rock, Saturday Night Live) and Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live) are the funniest female comedy duo in years. Amy’s simply hilarious in that unpredictable, hyper-expressive way. Tina, on the other hand, has enjoyed the rampant success of both her writing career at SNL and her ground-up creation of 30 Rock, in which she also stars. Now, both of them are united on-screen in Universal Studios’ Baby Mama, a movie starring the two girls in the next closest thing to a spousal relationship—surrogacy.
Lamentations of a T-Shaped Womb
Kate (Tina Fey) is a professional businesswoman who is quickly climbing the ranks of her corporation. She works at the Round Earth Organic Market headquarters, a large chain of supermarkets that is essentially the 800-pound gorilla of the organic foods reseller industry. But to the degree that her career is flourishing, her sex life is withered and dying. Frequently berated by her mother (Holland Taylor of Two and a Half Men) and increasingly pressured by the thought of her ticking biological clock, Kate has decided that she needs a baby and she needs one now. Unfortunately, disclosing her predicament to her dates over dinner doesn’t seem to be working so well. Unfettered, she turns to in-vitro fertilization—only to learn from her fertility specialist (John Hodgman, the PC from the Apple commercials) that she is practically infertile (a “one-in-a-billion” chance, he tells her). The quest for an adoption also leads her to a dead end.
So, in desperation, she turns to a surrogacy clinician (Sigourney Weaver) to match her up with one of their highly-qualified and dedicated contract surrogate mothers. The result is someone precisely neither (guess the $100,000 surrogacy fee isn’t quite enough to cover more extensive background checks). Angie (Amy Poehler) pulls up in an old beater in front of Kate’s apartment and storms out, squabbling with her freeloading boyfriend, Carl (Dax Shepard), about anything and everything. Blinded by her intense desire to have a child, Kate recklessly overlooks all of the warning signs and shakes the hand of Angie, prepared for motherhood.
Baby Drama
With Kate close by, Angie undergoes the implantation procedure and then returns to her usual life. But Angie and Carl don’t get along so well, and so one morning, Kate finds her dejected surrogate partner knocking at her door. As the days pass, the two roommates quickly grow conscious of their differences and begin to bicker about everything that defines their dichotomous relationship. And Kate becomes increasingly short-tempered as Angie continues her usual trailer-trash lifestyle within her apartment—complete with gratuitous consumption of Pringles, Dr. Pepper, and chewing gum, which always manages to find its way onto the underside of Kate’s coffee table. The two chide one another endlessly over everything, and the quarrels are generally quite funny.
While this plot recap doesn’t communicate the film’s humor very well, rest assured that this is a comedy at heart. Tina and Amy are great together even as they fight; the movie always seems to find a way to deflate the tension enough to keep things funny even as the plot chugs along. And there are plenty of other twinkles throughout as well. Perhaps the greatest of all of these is Steve Martin, who plays Kate’s hippie boss as the CEO of Round Earth. He always seems to find a way to put an eccentric spin on everything he does, whether it’s sitting Indian-style on top of the boardroom table or burning sage in front of a new store location. Steve is thoroughly hilarious in his role in every situation—he’s definitely the funniest part of the entire film. We also witness Romany Malco playing the “token black guy” of the film—a doorman from the slums of Philly—but his role still ends up providing a good helping of laughs. Finally, Kate eventually romanticizes with the owner of a smoothie shop (Greg Kinnear), even in spite of his “small-guy” resentment of Round Earth’s infiltrating his local market.
The movie doesn’t just drone along the expected story arc, either; things take a couple of sharp turns here and there keeping the plot delightfully lively, if still a bit predictable, up until the end. Nevertheless, while it’s a funny, feel-good romantic comedy featuring a talented array of cast members, it’s nothing remarkable—merely above-average. There are enough laughs and interesting developments to keep the audience interested (mostly thanks to the excellent cast), but the entirety of the film is pretty unsophisticated. Angie’s white-trash remarks and the supporting cast keep things lively, but in the end, Baby Mama fails to make a lasting impression. It’s entertaining, but sadly, not all that memorable.
Extras
Baby Mama is also oddly thin on extras, with no blooper reel, deleted scenes, or anything of the like. However, we do get nine short U-Control snippets for Picture-in-Picture/BonusView enabled players, which feature in-line interviews with the cast during key scenes of the film. Some of these are actually fairly lengthy, so it’s interesting that they weren’t made into separate features rather than shown during the film in U-Control. Either way, it’s entertaining and fun to watch the film a second time with U-Control enabled. Beyond that, there’s the obligatory commentary track, which in this case is actually very entertaining. It features Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, writer/director Michael McCullers, and producer Lorne Michaels, and, as you might expect, it’s filled with random jokes, most of which are quite funny. But there are also plenty of enlightening tidbits thrown out by the writer/director and producer. They discuss the typical range of juicy tidbits, from fun facts about actors and scenes to struggles with getting footage directly from America’s Funniest Home Videos for use in the movie. It’s definitely one of the most entertaining commentary tracks I’ve heard in a while.