A movie can’t survive on uterine humor alone. Baby Mama is proof in stirrups. All it had to do was last 90 minutes. That’s 10 minutes for every month of a character’s pregnancy. It made me wish Baby Mama was about African lions or pot-bellied pigs, whose babies gestate for about three months before birth. That movie would have hit the target jokes, found a nice stride and then, before it had too much umbilical cord to hang itself with, ended. But there I go, reviewing the movie that wasn’t even made.
The movie that was made is one of those One Truth Movies: The entire plot is held together by a lie so monumental that, should it be revealed, the cosmic forces holding the movie together would collapse, leaving us to pick the popcorn off our laps and trudge out to the parking lot.
The liar is surrogate mother Angie (Amy Poehler), a loony-ball redneck carrying the unborn seed of Kate (Tina Fey), who, at 37, is hopelessly single and listening to her biological clock grinding to a halt. Apparently, Kate has a T-shaped uterus, which is no good for babies since they haven’t learned their ABCs yet. And neither, it should be added, has Angie, whose taste in men explains Darwin’s theories in four different dimensions. Angie’s current guy doesn’t work because he’s trying to win arena football tickets in a radio station promotion — he has winner written all over him, but it’s spelled all wrong. 
At first Angie lies that she’s pregnant to mooch off Kate’s kindness, and her $10,000 mommy-to-be checks. Then, when Angie actually does get pregnant, another lie swells with her tummy: “Is this Kate’s lab-fertilized baby or is it my deadbeat boyfriend’s?” She plays it fast and loose and Kate learns the truth at the worst possible moment — the baby shower, the only place a baby-comedy this vapid could possibly end. A better movie would have developed Kate a little better, maybe suggested that she wasn’t as ready for mommyhood as she thought. Tina Fey, a feisty and refreshing force on 30 Rock and a former head writer on Saturday Night Live, is more expressive than Baby Mama gives her credit for. She and her movie could have been very funny, and possibly meaningful. Instead they’re just mildly humorous.
Then there’s the issue with Kate’s single status. You have to wonder what’s inherently wrong, on an emotional level, with a movie character as attractive, smart, sassy, sexy, intelligent and inventive as the one Fey plays who is unable to find a responsible and willing mate to help her produce offspring. Either she’s entirely too picky, or maybe she has a horrible foot odor or questionable, deal-breaking hygiene. Juno, last year’s big pregnancy movie, would have the answers, but Baby Mama just uses its star’s emotional well-being, and her baby, as a vehicle for a series of disposable jokes. 
And then there’s Poehler, Mama’s preggo floozy who plays dumb the way Beethoven wrote sonatas. I see crazy in her eyes, and I like it, although she’s required to play dense to such a degree that it becomes distracting — come on, she doesn’t understand how her reproductive system works? In birthing class she asks if Pam, the household cooking spray, could be used to make a baby Slip ’N Slide during delivery. She then holds breast pumps to her eyes like goggles. Her timing and delivery are perfect, but viewed as a piece of the whole, Poehler unbalances an already unbalanced picture. Ditto for Fey. It’s as if the characters would have been better on their own than together. Joining them in irrelevance is Sigourney Weaver, some kind of birthing expert who works out of an office that has probably been an Oval Office set on dozens of other movies, and Steve Martin, the great comedian who plays a hippie who apparently traded his LSD stash for an organic foods market. The pony-tailed windbag, with his aura-examining nuttiness, rewards staffers with five minutes of unbroken eye contact and expensive Tibetan prayer smoke. In a role not far removed from his dirtball in Bowfinger, Martin is either the best thing about Baby Mama or the worst depending on how you react to cervix gags, call it gynecomedy.
Women might appreciate Baby Mama. Men … not so much.
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