With the latest fads of celeb-trotting around the globe to pick out foreign kids for adoption like house pets, when not opting for the boom in artificially induced twin births – and now even a pregnant transsexual man boasting a hairy baby bump – a comedy about the comparatively conventional idea of nontraditional surrogate pregnancy was bound to materialize with Baby Mama. The Austin Powers screen mastermind, writer/director Michael McCullers is the guy behind this sorta same-sex parenting satire, as SNL’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler do the extreme odd couple for laughs duet here, ripping into the burgeoning baby consumer industry.
Fey is Kay, the fretting, perfectionist driven Philly career woman who’s been there, done that when it comes to everything on her success-obsessed checklist. Except, oops, she forgot to have a baby. So the fussy, body-clock challenged thirty-seven year worry wort old takes time out between pressure cooker business meetings to scrutinize far too time-consuming maternal options, like adoption and in-vitro fertilization with anonymous donors.
When informed that her uterus is getting rusty and basically sucks, Kay opts for a high end surrogate mom service. And where the kooky manager (Sigourney Weaver) brags that her package offering of ‘maternal outsourcing’ carried out by your own personal ‘gestation assistant’ is the wave of the future along with the way to go, especially for the businesswoman too busy for men or motherhood.
A delighted and relieved Kay settles on local lowlife Angie (Amy Poehler), to stash some of her pre-fertilized eggs in her more efficient womb for a bit, in exchange for a tidy sum. But Angie may have a scam or two gestating behind the scenes, while Kay is distracted by a single dad (Greg Kinnear) serving up exotic organic smoothies at his dead end fruit emporium downtown.
Baby Mama is a cut above all those SNL knockoff disasters that have transitioned poorly from the small screen to the plexes. And it’s got a lot more going for it than just strung-together skits and whether or not all those moms and babies get sorted out, correctly assigned, and live happily ever after. There’s plenty of nontraditional family humor and heart to go around here. Not to mention, who can resist a mommies-in-love movie with top of the line props, like a baby-proof stroller with airbags.
Universal Pictures
Rated PG-13
3 stars
