Post-Will Ferrell Saturday Night Live has had its highs and lows, but one thing shone above all the others: Weekend Update with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Fey has since left the show for 30 Rock, but now, Baby Mama reunites the duo in a chick flick as funny as it is sentimental.
Fey, in her first leading film role (Mean Girls doesn’t count; Fey may have written it, but Lindsay Lohan stole the show), stars as Kate Holbrook, the youngest vice president at Whole Foods knockoff Round Earth, who has just been tapped to spearhead Round Earth’s new flagship store in Philadelphia. She’s a successful, 37-year-old single woman, but she’s unfulfilled – Kate wants a baby. But alas, Kate tries to conceive artificially nine times to no avail, and her doctor tells her she has a “one in a million chance of conception.”
So, Kate opts to hire a surrogate. The fee? $100,000. The surrogate? The Dr. Pepper-drinking, ignorant-thinking, white-trash-looking Angie (Poehler, Saturday Night Live). Enter baby mama drama.
Angie rolls up to Kate’s swank Philadelphia apartment in a trashed Suzuki with her common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard). “He never asked me to be his wife, but he never didn’t ask me. So, it’s going pretty well,” Angie explains. But then, the marriage goes bad and Angie, now carrying Kate’s baby, shows up at Kate’s apartment and effectively moves in.
Kate and Angie live together as a modern-day odd couple – the strict, neat, healthy and career-driven Kate trying to tame the immature, messy, junk food-eating and TV-watching Angie. They learn to live together and even become friends – a task that isn’t so hard, considering the pair’s chemistry. Fey and Poehler could go down as one of the great comedic teams if they continue to make movies together – the dichotomy between the two works extremely well. Fey is the straight man to Poehler’s wackiness.
When Angie decides she’s going to be Kate’s surrogate, she reads Kate’s energy (something she’s apparently good at) and likes what she sees. “Kate, I want you to put your baby inside of me,” she says. “Angie, I’m going to put my baby inside you,” Kate replies. Then, the pair embraces as the sun sets. That scene, plus the following insemination scene, defines the chemistry between the two. It doesn’t matter if both characters have elements that are a tad unrealistic – Fey and Poehler work so well together they make the characters more believable.
One might assume that with Lorne Michaels aboard as executive producer and a host of SNL cast members and alumni throughout the film, Fey wrote Baby Mama like she did Mean Girls, but surprisingly, she didn’t. The man behind Baby Mama is Michael McCullers (Enough About Me), a former SNL writer who was also one of the writers behind Mike Myers’s Austin Powers trilogy. McCullers gets his first chance to direct here, and he does a formidable job. He makes some of the more ridiculous scenes (Angie’s insemination) work, and manages to strike a good balance between absurdity and reality.
There’s also an excellent supporting cast, with Steve Martin (The Pink Panther) stealing the show as Barry, the CEO of Round Earth. Martin’s character sports a graying ponytail and talks about essences and out-of-the-box ideas. He’s the extreme caricature of the corporate hippie. So, what is Barry’s reason for opening a flagship Round Earth store in Philadelphia? “I was swimming with the dolphins in Costa Rica this morning when I realized, ‘I’m a great man, and great men do great things.'” Barry’s pearls of wisdom dominate every scene he’s a part of.
Greg Kinnear (Feast Of Love) also shines as the owner of an independent juice shop – like Jamba Juice – in the neighborhood the new Round Earth is moving into. Shepard, who famously got his start in Hollywood as a prankster on Punk’d, isn’t in the film much, but when he is, he has the redneck persona down pat. Romany Malco (Weeds), who plays Oscar, Kate’s apartment building’s bellhop, is also funny as portraying the stereotypical black man with his own baby mama drama.
Baby Mama is an excellent film that straddles the line between chick-flick and straight comedy. While the film is aimed at thirty-somethings more than college kids, the film’s humor can resonate with anyone. Baby Mama has the chance to propel both Fey and Poehler to stardom beyond their TV personas, and with how good they are in this movie, it looks like both are ready for it.
rudi.greenberg@gmail.com
RATING: 4 STARS OUT OF 5
