Monday, June 09, 2008

Baby Mama

Tee-hee, procreation is funny.

But seriously, a huge part of creating comedy is finding the amusing in the everyday. Something that might not seem funny to you can be given a whole new spin in the hands of a skilled comedian. Now, I’m not saying that we should have comedies about the Holocaust or suicide bombings; some things are just out of bounds. But most of the good comedy movies would work nearly as well as serious dramas. Melinda & Melinda explores this idea more thoroughly, but that review is for another time. In this one, we’re talking about Baby Mama, and whether or not it worked.

The answer to that question is, “for the most part.” It wasn’t all giggly moments, which I appreciated, but some moments fell flat, and others were just plain not funny. The story involves a 37 year-old woman in Philadelphia named Kate (Tina Fey), whose biological clock is telling her she needs to have progeny. Since she’s married to her career, the traditional method of getting pregnant isn’t really an option, so she tries other ways, eventually settling on having her eggs fertilized and placed in a surrogate. That lucky lady is Angie (Amy Poehler), a Dr. Pepper-drinking party girl just a step above white trash. Kate works for a health food company owned by a whacko sketch-monster named Barry (Steve Martin), and lives in a posh apartment building with a ghetto doorman (Romany Malco).

While scoping out sites for a new store the company wants to open, she runs into Rob (Greg Kinnear), a small-business owner/ex-lawyer who runs a clone of Jamba Juice, who becomes her significant other. Things proceed as normal, except that Angie has all the motherly instinct of a sledgehammer, and she and her skeezy boyfriend (Dax Shepard) have a secret. Fey is all right as the straight woman, but I like her better when she’s playing the sardonic jokester, as she did so often on Saturday Night Live. Poehler, another SNL alum, really gives it her all with Angie, and the result is a very funny character, with moments of seriousness amidst the levity, both of which she does quite well. She has a knack for ridiculousness and flamboyance.

But, as with all ensamble comedies, the real gems are the supporting characters. Kinnear is splendid as Rob, with surprisingly good comedic timing. He’s a great match for Fey’s kinda buttoned-up control freak. Malco is the shiz as Oscar the doorman, though he plays largely the same character as his 40 Year Old Virgin gig, the only other film I’ve seen him in. Maura Tierney plays her role as the sensible sister competently, though she seems a little out of place. Sigourney Weaver even shows up as the weird and kooky head of the agency where Kate has her surrogacy done. And Siobhan Fallon provides several guilty giggles as a birthing instructor with a massive speech impediment.

Baby Mama had plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but nothing was too out of the ordinary, with the exception of a very odd scene where Angie is getting pregnant with Kate’s eggs. Let’s just say it was a sex scene like no other. This movie had an all-star cast, though nobody really stole the spotlight from anyone else. Though the story mostly centered around Kate and Angie, each of the minor characters had their moment (or moments) in the sun. I also appreciated the happy ending, even if the movie was a tad sentimental before then.

Michael McCullers (an SNL writer sitting in the director’s chair for the first time) does a good job of balancing humor with weight, though the flow of his narrative leaves something to be desired. The dialogue is a little stilted, especially for someone who wrote for SNL. But I might have been spoiled rotten forever, since Arrested Development. I could also pick on his directorial and editing style, but this is his very first movie, so that seems a little hard-hearted. And the message of the movie seems to be that in this age of so many new ways to become parents, there is one thing that never changes: love. This gets it a lot of points in my book.

In general, Baby Mama is a fun lark, though it need not be watched on a theater screen; DVD will do just fine. It was released at a pretty inopportune time, what with Indy 4 and Iron Man still running, but it’s worth the ticket.

Iconic Lines:
“Yeah, I just don’t like your uterus.”
“Congratulations, Kate. Now, I’m going to reward you with 5 minutes of uninterrupted eye contact.”
“I’m gonna bang all your friends! Consider them banged!”

22 Rating: 8

Particle Man

5 comments:

Mike said...

Meh. the trailer for this wasn't very good, and it's hard for me to work up enthusiasm for any comedy that doesn't have the name "Apatow" attached to it during the summertime. Plus, such a crowded release schedule.......

Dr. Worm said...

Nice review, PM. I think I agree with pretty much everything you wrote here, including the rating (though I might have given more props to Steve Martin). But I'm with you on the whole that it's an appropriately-amusing-yet-surprisingly-serious comedy-with-timing/flow-issues.

What was interesting to me was to compare it to the corpus of movies delivered by SNL vets, with Will Ferrell's streak being the most recent/obvious. It seemed (to me) that Baby Mama was a little less over the top, that the characters were a little more grounded in reality, than Will Ferrell/Mike Myers/Tim Meadows etc. films. I interpreted that as the female influence (and it should be pointed out how rare it is to have a comedy with no real male lead), but it could just as easily have been a conscious choice to avoid the excesses of the other SNL films. Your thoughts?

Neal Paradise said...

but YRF, it has "SNL" attached to it, which should give it some clout.

very apt, DW. in the past, comedies by SNL alums have tended toward the ridiculous. look at Black Sheep, Superstar, or the awful Night at the Roxbury. the best one (and most serious, until Baby Mama) i've seen has been Mean Girls, another one with a heavy female influence. that was written and co-starred Tina Fey. so maybe it's not necessarily the female influence, but the Fey influence. this may have been a deliberate attempt on Fey's part to give a less excessive spin on the SNL comedy, but SNL has always been about excess, hasn't it?

Mike said...

Not really. From the people who brought you A Night At The Roxbury? It's Pat? Coneheads? Wayne's World 2? Some things don't translate well, and that's one of them.

Neal Paradise said...

you've got a point there.