When a member of Judd Apatow's extended comedy troupe pops up on screen, the audience claps and laughs out of sheer anticipation. When a member of Lorne Michaels' does so, it's tumbleweeds, which is symptomatic of the larger problems at work in Baby Mama, an exhausting 90 minutes of SNL-centric mediocrity that gives one the nagging feeling that Tina Fey's inability to cut the cord is going to quickly start to cool interest in her upcoming projects. Her relative freshness as a big-screen presence is one of the few selling points in this poorly executed story of a single late-thirties Philadelphian whose inability to get pregnant causes her to yoke herself to a fertile white trash goofus played by SNL's Amy Poehler, the idea being that the latter will be injected with the former's eggs and act as a surrogate birth mother for cash.
Fey is Kate Holbrook, middle-management at an organic food company and supposedly seized with baby fever, although first-time director Michael McCullers (former SNL writer) is unable to sell that particular character motivation, which would have required him to jangle Fey out of her comfort zone and have her do some genuine acting instead of maintaining the sarcastic distance that allows her to toss off one-liners. A good example is an early scene, which has Kate standing rigid and unapproachable as her sister, played by Maura Tierney, chases her own kids around in circles, doing a taste test to find out if a suspicious brown stain is "chocolate or poop." If this is the movie's idea of parenting and Kate is open to those kinds of dicey scenarios, why not have her get down and dirty too? Instead, she's relegated to Fey's traditional role as observer-commenter in the scene. Yes, someone's got to deliver the punchlines, but we never for a second buy the idea that Kate is actually a woman desperately eager for messy motherhood — it doesn't sell.
Still, the story must go on and Kate finds herself at a fancy surrogacy clinic run by Chaffee Bicknell (Weaver), who becomes the butt of the film's most persistent and somewhat cruel gag — that she's still fertile despite being in her late 50s. The clinic matches Kate up with low-class Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler) and her common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard) and a series of no-energy Odd Couple squabbles ensue, with Angie immediately barging in on Kate after a break-up and then using the underside of Kate's coffee table to get rid of gum and peeing in her sink when she's unable to figure out a childproof lock on the toilet. Stuff like that, basically, for the rest of the film. Which would be fine if the jokes were either well-crafted or brought out the best of the Fey-Poehler dynamic, already well-defined on television, but the demands of cinema don't suit them well, it seems. It's possible to see their wheels spinning in every scene as they use their sketch experience to hit their marks and get across the basic ideas but decline to put any real investment into the lines, which becomes more awkward as the plot becomes more involved. Meanwhile Kate is wooed by Greg Kinnear, who is often great when he's playing to his natural dramatic strengths or his inherently shifty looks in films like The Gift, but is just another paycheck player here.
Steve Martin, who knocks wood every day for escaping the quality scrutiny that now dogs Pacino and De Niro, appears in a protracted supporting role as Kate's boss, a long-haired business guru without a single funny moment. A gag in which he touches foreheads with Kate to transfer inspiration to her feels like the kind of thing that might have gone over well in 1976 but is completely alien to today's expectations of comedy. At least we know who Martin is, though — the film is also heavily populated with "that guy" and "what's his name?" from various seasons of SNL, cameos that exist only to draw attention to themselves and slow the movie down. Cut the cord, Tina. Cut the cord.
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VIEW: Baby Mama photos
