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Baby Mama
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: April 27, 2008

Comedy's risk/reward ratio exists both at the conceptual stage and at the point of delivery. A high-risk concept is only truly offensive if the comedians involved fail to prove otherwise with similarly high-risk antics. Meanwhile, the reward, if all goes well, can be a kind of cultural catharsis, a chance to laugh at what would usually bum us out. Borat comes to mind as a successful high-risk comedy, and Drillbit Taylor comes to mind as a failure.

And then there's this week's bland and un-cathartic film Baby Mama. Written and directed by Michael McCullers, this comedy doesn't seem to have any notion that it's playing with emotional matches, and the humor it delivers is just not gutsy enough to offset the potentially painful subject matter. The plot concerns a successful and sophisticated 37-year old career-woman named Kate, who comes to realize that she desperately wants a child, but also learns that the shape of her uterus won't allow her to conceive. Her solution is to hire Angie, a rather less successful and sophisticated woman, to carry her fertilized eggs. And now contractually bound, Kate and Angie become a modern-day, female "odd couple," with the health of the unborn child hanging in the balance of every argument.

Hey, I've got a sense of humor folks. This material is fertile ground, if you will, for comedy. Furthermore the lead actresses are Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both brilliant comediennes whose presence makes Baby Mama a frequently endearing movie despite itself. But in the final reckoning, this film is just not very funny. It suffers from the all-too-common belief that a comedic tone is an adequate substitute for actual comedy. And that makes it all the more unnerving when Kate spends so much of the film pining for a child, and reaching out to nurture the various babies she encounters in the course of her day. Frankly, Tina Fey is so good and believable in the lead role, someone should have rewritten this as a genuine story about the emotional complications of surrogate pregnancy, and then handed it to a director with some sensitivity. It turns out Tina Fey could be an appealing dramatic actress, folks. If she wants to subject herself to material she hasn't written, she could do a lot better than this.

Meanwhile, a good portion of this film, believe it or not, simply makes fun of health food. With its odd couple format, it pretends to jab at both women's lifestyles, the sophisticated and the uncultured. But Baby Mama doesn't have the nerve to let Amy Poehler play an actual moron, as she does so often and so perfectly on Saturday Night Live. And it has no ammunition against Kate, except predictable yawners about how she's so career-minded that she doesn't know how to dance. It's not exactly sidesplitting humor.

What we get, instead of anything remotely courageous, are endless jokes about fruit smoothies, multivitamins, and organic pea soup, while the plot moves toward a conveniently happy and miraculous conclusion to distinctly unsettling affairs. And along the way, as you might guess, Kate learns to dance and Angie learns to appreciate a healthy diet. Uggh. Folks, when you consider the quality of shows like Tina Fey's 30 Rock, films like Baby Mama don't even hold up to TV standards anymore. Throw this one out with the bath water.

Copyright © 2008 Theo Michelfeld