GA-GA FOR TINA
“BABY MAMA”
Directed and Written by Michael McCullers 
Stars: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard, Romany Malco, Sigourney Weaver
Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and a drug reference. 99 minutes.

Baby Mama has a terminal case of the cutes: Cute title, cute premise, and lots of cute babies.  Fortunately, it also has Tina Fey who’s far from cute; she’s a knockout.  Smart, sexy, funny, and aided by a terrific supporting cast, Fey elevates Baby Mama from its standard sitcom setup (a feminine Odd Couple) and in the process helps make it an amiable crowd-pleaser that put a smile on my face most of the time.   It’s not great, but it’s consistently not bad either. 

Fey plays Kate Holbrook, a successful female executive at a health food company that traded marriage and kids for a career but now at 37, she hears the ticking of her bio-clock and is frantic for a child.  Sadly, she finds out from her OB-GYN (much like Holly Hunter did in Raising Arizona) that she is barren down below and can’t get pregnant.  Desperate, Kate turns to a surrogate in the form of Angie (Amy Poehler), a white-trash working girl with a lousy boyfriend (Dax Shepard) and an equally desperate need for money. 

The unlikely pair agrees to deliver a baby, but things get complicated when Angie splits with her boyfriend and moves in with Kate.  This odd coupling gets even odder as straight-laced Kate, a Type A personality, clashes with the lazy, junk-food craving Angie. The movie does get bogged down in the middle stretch as the two women fight and argue over everything from video games and dieting to the improper way to use a bathroom sink.  Most of the jokes here (the best ones, anyway) were seen in the advance trailer, thus taking away any surprise element and giving the film a temporary staleness. 

As Baby Mama began to play itself out, however there were a couple of twists thrown in, one that I saw coming a mile away, and one I did not.  There’s also a B story involving Kate’s budding romance with nice guy Rob (Greg Kinnear) who owns a health food drink store. 

While Baby Mama is no classic screwball farce, it does have its moments and most of those moments belong to Tina Fey who may be bordering on movie stardom.  She has a smart, laid-back appeal and never tries to force a joke or mug for the camera (She leaves those to co-star Amy Poehler who’s a bit broad and over-the-top).  Fey must have learned that it’s always best to do duets instead of solos (as she does with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock); here, she gets to play off of Kinnear, Romany Malco (as the doorman at Fey’s apartment building) Sigourney Weaver (as the head of the Surrogate Agency), and Steve Martin who steals every scene he’s in as the CEO of the Health Food Company that Kate works for.  As an added bonus, there’s Holland Taylor as her mother and Maura Tierney as her sister; the cast simply couldn’t be better.

Writer-Director Michael McCullers (who worked on the Austin Powers movies) is no comedy stylist but he knows how to keep the one-liners coming and he gives Fey and Poehler some really good ones; he’s also smart enough to keep the running time relatively short.  McCullers can’t, however, get around the conventions of his own story as we know that eventually the two female opposites will attract, tame and teach each other a little life lesson before all is said and done. 

Still, Baby Mama is worth seeing because in this Age of Apatow where crass trumps class, it’s nice to see a comedy that reverses that trend; it’s also one of the few films to showcase two female leads that doesn’t condescend to its audience or patronize its characters.  It earns its hugs.