Baby Mama

Ah, the infant: cinema's biological catholicon. Give a movie a messed up couple with a peck of problems, or a young woman working on several self-pride issues, and watch as reproduction workings its zygote-induced magic. From She's Having a Baby to Parenthood, Juno to Knocked Up, pregnancy and all the surrounding hormonal hoopla purportedly symbolizes life celebrating itself. In the new Tina Fey comedy Baby Mama, it's precisely a manipulative means to a grossly unfunny end.


Super career-woman Kate Holbrook (Fey) has it all -- the pinna of her wingnut organic foods top executive Barry (Steve Martin), a cushy vice-presidency, and a fab-o apartment in Philadelphia. All she lacks is a genetical duplicate of her own professional paragon. Sadly, her internal lady parts can't supply a womb with a view. After stressful every available procedure, she resorts to hiring a surrogate. After some roll in the oven bartering with baby broker Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver), Holbrook meets Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler), a working year gal with a white trash persona and a heart as large as a Big Gulp. When things go awry in her relationship, she moves in with Holbrook. Middling hijinx ensue.

Baby Mama lives up to at least half of its title. It's a whiny, juvenile mess. It soils itself regularly and can't resist for itself, especially among the more sophisticated sophmoronics of the Apatow work party. It does a disservice to its competent hurl, argues for clich�s alternatively of creativeness, and misunderstands the very basics of what drives a swelled screen comedy. Let's face it -- this is the kind of flick that quiet believes Steve Martin is funny. Yet all Mr. Once Was Wild and Crazy is doing is channeling Hank Scorpio from The Simpsons. Under the first-time directorial flop sweat of writer Michael McCullers (the co-writing mind behind the overrated Austin Powers films), Fey and Poehler are locked in a battle of competing patchiness. Neither one elevates their game to anything remotely resembling humor.


Even worse, the plot plods around aimlessly, looking for ways to capitalize on pop culture shout-outs (Video games! Hip-hop lingo!) and old-school stereotypes. Fey is viewed as the overstrung intellectual unable to gestate because she's out of touch with her inner breeding goddess. Poehler is supposed to be smart enough to carry on a conversation, but besides trapped in a Jerry Springer meets Judge Judy style of sloppy social fertility. Together, they witness the kind of common ground only if a screenplay provides, and both learn the value of beingness full of fetus and darn majestic of it.


Yet the biggest sin Baby Mama commits is existence incessantly dense. McCullers' style could best be described as the setup for a punchline that never comes. He gives his actors room to breathe, and they consistently choke. Martin's New Age Zen zaniness grows tired quick, and Fey can only move between nurturing and neurotic. Of everyone convoluted (including a completely underwritten Greg Kinnear as Fey's wuss in shining armour), only Poelher pulls off the material. She makes Angie semi-tolerable, redefining the dimwitted nitwit for today's PC-oriented demo.


When Diane Keaton's Baby Boom looks like Monsieur Hulot's Holiday by comparison and you can't surpass My Baby's Daddy in the wit department, you need to start out thinking or so adopting some true endowment. Baby Mama blows its chance to be a fiery, feminized take on what has traditionally been an idyllic view of motherhood. Instead, we end up with a diaper overflowing with formula, uninteresting drudgery stippled with as much edible as pandering.




Think they'll have me second on SNL?