DIRECTED BY: MICHAEL MCCULLERS
STARRING: TINA FAY, AMY POEHLER, SIGOURNEY WEAVER, STEVE MARTIN, GREG KINNEAR
AS THE creative driving force and star of the excellent American comedy show 30 Rock, Tina Fey enjoys
a lot of love at the moment, which means she is probably due a break-out hit on the big screen sometime soon.
Baby Mama will doubtless deliver it for her too, since it's an inoffensive, likeable enough film with some decent one-liners and a nice, mismatched energy between Fey and the other lead, the excellent Amy Poehler. But in many respects it's a missed opportunity, another example of a whip-smart TV star finding herself in a film that's a little too safe and predictable to really showcase her talents.
In a minor variation on her 30 Rock character, late-night TV executive Liz Lemons, Fey plays Kate Holbrook, an intelligent, sardonic, slightly nerdy career woman with little in the way of a social life who realises her biological clock is ticking a little louder than it used to. At 37, she may be the youngest vice president of the eco-friendly conglomerate she works for, but she also knows that, were she to fall pregnant, her age would make her the oldest new mother in the place. Not that that's likely to happen any time soon. Single and all too aware of the fact that men can sense her desperation for a child, she's decided to go the artificial insemination route but is informed by her doctor that she's got t-shaped tubes, making pregnancy a one-in-a-million shot.
With odds like those, it's no wonder she decides employ the services of a high-priced surrogate mother agency run by a wonderfully snide and politely bitchy Sigourney Weaver, whose character, Chaffe Bicknell, refers to surrogacy as the ultimate form of "outsourcing" labour and uses her continued ability to procreate – despite having, as one character puts it, "eggs from the 40s" – to feel superior to her clients. This is how Kate is thrown together with the down-on-her-luck Angie (Poehler), a vacuous-seeming blonde who drinks, smokes, eats all the wrong food, loves karaoke and reckons Stefani (as in Gwen Stefani) is the ideal first name for a child.
Angie is the kind of white trash dumb blonde that could easily have become a cruel caricature, but Poehler invests her with a sweetness that makes her easy to like and feel for, even when her thoughtlessness seems unspeakably cruel. Fey too is good value as Poehler's straight woman. After Angie leaves her idiot boyfriend (Dax Shepherd) and ends up moving in with Kate, it would have been all to easy to ratchet up the odd couple conflict and turn Kate into an uber-neurotic, but Fey never lets us forget that deep down Kate's infertility is a source of pain for her, which makes her a more sympathetic and less brittle character than she might have been otherwise.
Still, for all their good work, and for all the efforts the film makes to keep them front and centre without reducing them to shrieking, men-obsessed stereotypes, writer-director Michael McCullers doesn't take enough risks with his material to really lift this out of the realms of passable Friday night entertainment. That's frustrating because at times the film hints that it will address something a little more risqué, by tapping into the very real fear that, even with medical advances being what they are, some women might still be unable to have careers and families. Alas, every time it touches on such issues, it backs off, resolving everything in easy, Hollywood style.
It probably doesn't help that Fey has already covered this material in a particularly memorable episode of 30 Rock when she suddenly and inexplicably found herself obsessed with babies to the point where she inadvertently walked off with one belonging to a complete stranger.
It was a strange, subversive moment – and really funny as a result. Baby Mama is less interested in finding comedy in such uncomfortable moments; it's fluffier and cuddlier and just wants to be loved.
Indeed, from the moment Greg Kinnear shows up as a reformed corporate lawyer-turned juice bar owner, the film reveals its true ambitions as just another so-so romantic comedy that never leaves you in any doubt about the outcome.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but had the producers done the smart thing and hired Fey to write the film as well as star in it (she wrote the script for Mean Girls, which is one of the reasons that film was such an enormous hit), this might have felt more like her baby than someone else's.
The full article contains 795 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
