Tina Fey’s biological clock looms like Big Ben and Amy Poehler provides the ding-dong in the surrogacy satire “Baby Mama.” About a barren thirtysomething’s need to breed, the movie is a rare breed itself in chauvinist Hollywood. It’s a genuinely funny girl-buddy comedy that’s more about female bonding and less about getting the guy.
Two of the most talented dames to ever emerge from the ranks of “Saturday Night Live,” the bespectacled straightwoman Fey and adorably delirious Poehler share a honed comic timing and an effortless chemistry here as they have on the tube together.
This estrogen-fueled odd couple, aided by two hilarious small turns from veteran movie stars Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver, raise exponentially the mirth factor of an often witty screenplay by director-writer Michael McCullers (the scripter behind two of the “Austin Powers” movies). He sends up the territory Diane Keaton first mined 20 years ago in “Baby Boom,” about the tug on working women between career and parenthood. But this go-round, the filmmaker doesn’t just concentrate on the dilemma of affluent yuppies. He also considers the plight of blue-collar women —however unrepresentative the loony-bird character played by Poehler may be in that world.
McCullers refuses to let the plot go exactly where you might expect as it makes fun of — without demonizing — both the repressed single business executive Kate Holbrook (Fey) and her hedonistic trailer trash surrogate mother-for-hire Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler).
As the social classes clash between them, the movie’s gags take greatest aim at the paranoid state of modern motherhood. Obsessive baby-proofing, the pretentious names given newborns these days, and the perverse industry of infertility all get a well-deserved drubbing as the desperate Kate orders up womb service from Angie.
Meanwhile, each gal has a love interest with whom to contend. Angie’s cheating common law husband (Dax Shepard) grubs for cash from what turns out to be a bungled surrogacy arrangement, while Kate meets a more suitable suitor (Greg Kinnear). The romantic-comedy subplot with Kinnear doesn’t really fly, though, since Fey functions more believably as hapless heroine than as fetching ingenue.
But with Martin playing a beyond-affected bohemian tycoon and Weaver as a mysteriously pregnant post-menopausal prig, in scene-stealing support, the occasionally lagging “Mama” hits the farcical mother-load more than enough.
‘Baby Mama’
Three Stars
Starring: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Steve Martin
Director: Michael McCullers
Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and a drug reference
Running time: 96 minutes
