Baby Mama

What’s the Story?

BABY MAMA is writer-director Michael McCullers' riotous film about Kate (Tina Fey), a high-powered natural food store exec who can't get pregnant. She's tried everything, including in-vitro fertilization, but her T-shaped uterus is supposedly inhospitable to babies. (One doctor tells her point-blank, "I just don't like your uterus.") So Kate opts for surrogacy, signing up with an elite agency that matches her with spunky Angie (Amy Poehler). Angie's rough around the edges -- she hops on a sink to relieve herself when a childproofed toilet proves too challenging to negotiate -- but she means well, for the most part. One hilarious insemination process later, they're in the mommy business. Or are they?

Is It Any Good?

Fey and Poehler are a fabulous team -- so fun and funny to watch. Refreshingly un-saccharine even when they participate in the obligatory female bonding moment (playing a karaoke video game, no less), they take a good-enough plot and infuse it with their subversive though still-pleasant humor (they've been working together beautifully for years, and it shows). Fey in particular is ever more able, proving herself to be a comedic genius.

Add Greg Kinnear (more appealing than ever as Kate's from-left field love interest) and Dax Shepard (Angie's clueless-but-comical commonlaw husband) to season the mix. Then, top it off with Steve Martin as the self-aggrandizing, name-dropping, ponytailed tree-hugging CEO of Kate's company ("I am a great man, and great men do great things," he intones) and Sigourney Weaver as the blithely insensitive surrogacy-center owner -- who's compelled to boast about her own body's amazing ability to get pregnant despite being in her 50s -- and you have a winner. There's even some insight into the class wars as they play out in the organic foods-versus-junk food realm, as well as a dash of real poignancy in how much Kate craves a baby. So what if it's predictable? Bottom line: Brilliant? No. But laugh-out-loud funny? Definitely.