Thursday, April 24, 2008

Movie Review: Baby Mama

By Todd Maternowski

Baby Mama

Successful and single businesswoman Kate Holbrook has long put her career ahead of a personal life. Now 37, she's finally determined to have a kid on her own. But her plan is thrown a curve ball after she discovers she has only a million-to-one chance of getting pregnant. Undaunted, the driven Kate allows South Philly working girl Angie Ostrowiski to become her unlikely surrogate. Simple enough? After learning from the steely head of their surrogacy center that Angie is pregnant, Kate goes into precision nesting mode: reading childcare books, baby-proofing the apartment and researching top pre-schools. But the executive's well-organized strategy is turned upside down when her "baby mama" shows up at her doorstep with no place to live. An unstoppable force meets an immovable object as structured Kate tries to turn vibrant Angie into the perfect expectant mom. In a comic battle of wills, they will struggle their way through preparation for the baby's arrival. And, in the middle of this tug-of-war, they'll discover two kinds of family: the one you're born to and the one you make.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Baby Mama

With the boffo box-office success of unwed mother comedies Knocked Up and Juno, it was only a matter of time before some oily, walnut-brained movie executive saw this and decided that his studio needed to rush a similar film into production to get itself a slice of that action. And with typical big studio bravado, Universal has put together Baby Mama, a picture that cost twice as much as Juno while remaining half as entertaining.

The formula is presumably pretty sound: take a stable of former Saturday Night Live actors, throw in some cute shots of babies and have the guy who penned two of the Austin Powers movies write and direct the film. Co-stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were two of the brightest stars on SNL, and a previous cinematic collaboration of theirs, 2004's Mean Girls, is still one of the sharpest and most memorable teen comedies of the past decade. Throw in seasoned, cagey comedy veterans like Greg Kinnear, Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver, along with longtime SNL guru Lorne Michaels, and you have a can't-miss movie! Right?

Unfortunately, writer/director Michael McCullers trots out a predictable and tired script, while he and producer Lorne Michaels --who knew what 'funny' was 30 years ago-- waste the assembled comic talent in a mostly quiet, humorless clone of a Lifetime Original Movie. While there are several great comedic moments throughout the film, the estrogen-o-centric version of Knocked Up hinted at in the previews was nowhere to be seen.

The movie stars 37-year old successful working writer Tina Fey as 37-year old successful working executive Kate, a hard-charging vice president of an organic foods store who sacrificed MarriageBabyMommy life for corporate success and a nice, comfortable financial existence. After an unexplored, glossed-over major life change, Kate decides that she needs to do whatever it takes to have a baby: a quick montage of awkward first dates, quick trips to the sperm bank and a poorly explained-away adoption sequence later, and Kate is left with just one option: surrogate motherhood.

It's unclear where Poehler drew her source of inspiration from for her role in the film

Enter Amy Poehler as Angie, whose lower-class brash antics clash awkwardly with Kate's upper-crust elitism. Besides being the other end of yet another Odd Couple pairing, Angie serves as a female version of the Homer Simpson/Peter Griffin/Master Shake role: the unrepentant buffoon that says and does the exact opposite of what we're supposed to say and do. Angie is supposed to be just such a bull-in-a-china-shop character, devastating every scene like a runaway monster truck barreling into a hemophiliac daycare.

Instead, Poehler --who is at her best when playing zany (i.e., Blades of Glory)-- is given little to work with here. A few choice lines, a couple of scenes where she can "crazy-out" her eyes, and a handful of sight gags are all we get from the purported "funny" half of the pairing. But even that much is far more than Fey gets: Fey is given zero witty lines in the 99-minute long movie, showing none of the razor-sharp wit she's known for --opting to show plenty of leg instead.

While old timers Greg Kinnear, Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver are excellent in secondary roles, every comic bit is sandwiched by plenty of predictable drama, as bland and tasteless as the organic food the movie makes the most fun of. Writer Michael McCullers seems to have lost whatever edge he had from the Austin Powers and Undercover Brother movies, and from the very beginning of the movie the alleged comedy falls flat. Successful comedies from Duck Soup to Airplane to Superbad all know that to produce a great work of comedy, timing is everything: never, ever let the audience breathe, even for a minute, before you hit them with the next line. Baby Mama not only allows the audience to breathe between jokes, but to drift and daze.

Good comedy is all about tie-ming

Even grizzled comedy warrior Steve Martin looks a little uncomfortable in his role as Barry, who has most of the best lines in the movie as the corporate new age uberdouche. The movie is not helped by the musical score, which is primarily low-energy hotel-lobby tinkling with the occasional indie-pop acoustic ballad thrown in to slow things down even more.

Watching the movie, I couldn't help but recall my first and only visit to the allegedly-legendary bastion of improv comedy, Second City in Chicago. Things were not going well that night for the performers --at one point one of them started screaming at an anonymous audience member for insinuating he had a big nose (I still get chills just recalling the crowd's gut-wrenchingly awkward silence after that one)-- and towards the end two of the actors, trying to save the night with an audience-chosen wacky improv routine, instead spent ten minutes trapped in a sitcom-y, existential middle-age crisis skit that was completely bereft of laughter.

Why? Because drama is easy. Comedy is hard. Unfortunately, the team that pieced together Baby Mama seems to have taken the easy road in this film, opting for the lukewarm and comfortable over the edgy, risk-taking comedy that each of these performers built their reputations on.

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• Arts > Movies / Film > Mainstream Movies

Comments

Chad Jones Staff

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2 months, 1 week ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )