The biological clock ticks for 37-year-old Katie (Tina Fey), and her barren womb leads her to look to Angie (Amy Poehler) to bear a child for her in the comedy Baby Mama.
PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES.
SEBRING, May 7, 2008 - Baby Mama’s story about a desperate businesswoman who turns to surrogate motherhood to get the child she wants gives birth to a fair share of laughs.
The plot centers on Katie, a 37-year-old woman who’s neglected relationships for the sake of career.
With her biological clock ticking, Katie’s preoccupation with motherhood torpedoes her dates.
After a try at impregnation from a sperm bank fails, Katie learns from a specialist that she cannot bear children.
So she makes a last, desperate attempt to be a mother through surrogacy, the business of hiring another woman to carry Katie’s own artificially inseminated eggs.
Since large sums of money are involved, Katie gets Angie (Amy Poehler) a piece of poor, white trash goaded by her common law husband, Carl, to be her surrogate through a questionable agency.
The twists and characterizations elicit the laughs from there.
Baby Mama is reasonably well scripted, brainier than Made of Honor, but with a better cast that comes through. Tina Fey is solid as Katie, the lead and the foil, though for a powerful vice-president she wears the same pair of shoes on three separate days in the film, a mistake by continuity.
Poehler is solid, too, except that she gives the feel of someone who is playing a character. She never actually becomes the character. It’s the natural (and deliberate) limitation of working on Saturday Night Live (where Fey has worked, too), where knowing it’s a parody is half the fun. Recognizing it in film, however, is a weakness.
Fortunately, the film is bolstered by veterans Sigourney Weaver as shady surrogate agent Chaffee Bicknell and Steve Martin as Round Earth CEO Barry, a quirky, new agey pseudo-sophisticate. The scripting for both is top notch, and both deliver juicy performances.
The filmmakers even suggest that maybe single motherhood is not such a good idea. Bravo, if they are. It is about time we confess, despite our effort to make everyone feel comfortable with his or her situation, that single-parent families are not nearly as strong or effective as carefully built, two-parent families sustained with love and commitment.
Baby Mama is rated PG-13 for unnecessary crudities and profanity.
Our Sebring Cinema and Sports Rating (1 to 5 reels, 5 being best):
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