Baby Mama (2008)

O Masterpiece
O Excellent
X Good
O OK
O Mediocrity
O Avoid

Review by Jason Pyles / June 17, 2008

Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) is 37, single, and a professional woman with a flourishing career in Philadelphia. She has almost everything she’s ever wanted — except a baby. Yes, Kate wants to be a mom more than anything; she’s basically tried all the modern medical methods, short of adoption (which is not a medical method), but Kate is told that she has a “hostile uterus.”

Now, up to this point, “Baby Mama” has a tinge of underlying sadness to it. There’s nothing funny about someone who desperately wants to be a parent but cannot. Take heart, the movie cheers up.

Kate eventually uses a surrogate service, which is a business contract where the mother-hopeful pays another woman to carry her baby to term, at which point the surrogate hands the baby over to the new mom and happily departs with her considerable financial compensation.

In “Baby Mama,” Kate doesn’t have much say over her surrogate’s selection process, so she ends up with Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler), a childlike woman who is Kate’s opposite in every way. Naturally, with Kate’s ultra-carefulness and Angie’s relative carelessness, conflicts abound.

But that’s not all there is to “Baby Mama.” It has a number of refreshingly unexpected developments that horrify and delight us. The writer, Michael McCullers (who is also the director), has given us a good movie that conjures within us a wide range of emotions, some of them complex.

No. I’m not claiming it’s the best movie of the year, but “Baby Mama” delivers.

Directed by Michael McCullers
Tina Fey / Amy Poehler / Greg Kinnear
Comedy 99 min.
MPAA: PG-13 (for crude and sexual humor, language and a drug reference)

U.S. Release Date: April 25, 2008
Copyright 2008: 285