You can see the ending of Michael McCullers’s Baby Mama
coming a long way off. I won’t give it away here, but it wouldn’t
really matter if I did. You should be able to predict it for
yourself well before the movie’s half-way point. This is not in
itself a bad thing, necessarily. The endings of romantic comedies
— which in some ways this picture aspires to be — are at least
equally predictable and no one minds that. It’s actually part of
their charm, we feel pleasure both in the happy ending and in being
able to anticipate it through the vicissitudes that the lovers have
to suffer before it. But Baby Mama is not, quite, a
romantic comedy, even though it is comic and there is a romance of
the usual type in it. This is really the problem with the film. The
romance is a mere plot device in what aspires to be a hybrid of
your typical Hollywood comedy of manners and that very rare thing
in American art — or any other art these days — a class
satire.
Tina Fey, the red hot writer-actress-producer from “Saturday
Night Live” and “30 Rock,” plays high-flying career girl Kate
Holbrook, newly made vice-president of a chain of Whole Foods-like
supermarkets called Round Earth Organic Market, headquartered in
Philadelphia. “Some women get pregnant; I got promotions,” she
tells us in voiceover. Then, suddenly, at age 37 and with no male
companion either married or unmarried to her, she decides she wants
to have a baby. “Katie’s coming out of the mommy closet,” says her
sister Caroline (Maura Tierney), a mother of two. The metaphor
would seem to suggest that maternal longings are nowadays to be
regarded as a shameful secret, at least in certain feminist
circles. I have some doubts about this myself, but we can overlook
them for the sake of the comedic potentiality of such a piquant
reversal of the old social expectations that today’s women (at
least some of them) may be faced with.
Naturally, Kate tries artificial insemination, but she is
informed that she is the unhappy possessor of a T-shaped uterus and
that her chances of conceiving are approximately a million to one.
So she decides to go with option number two: surrogacy through an
agency run by the preternaturally fertile Sigourney Weaver, who is
trying hard to be funny but not succeeding. Steve Martin as
pony-tailed Barry, Round Earth’s New Agey CEO is similarly
overdone, by the way. Through the agency, Kate finds Angie (fellow
SNL alumna Amy Poehler), a young woman from dreary-looking Dreery,
Pennsylvania, who might once have been called “white trash” but
whose class origins here are suggested by the squalor of the
apartment she shares with the unsavory Carl (Dax Shepard) and the
fact that Carl, meant to be seen, I guess, as a kind of
Shakespearean “clown” or rustic grotesque, sees her surrogacy as an
opportunity for scamming the well-to-do lady who wants to rent his
girlfriend’s womb.
But Angie and Carl split up, also predictably, and Angie comes
to live in Kate’s upscale apartment where, you won’t be surprised
to learn, Odd Couple-style hijinks ensue. To some extent,
the sting of the film’s satire is drawn and its tendency to turn up
its delicate nose at the dirt and ill-doings of the lower orders is
mitigated by making blonde Angie into more than just a ditz but a
genuine and ultimately sympathetic character. Early on, she is even
licensed to give voice to such semi-outrageous opinions as
dismissing organic food with the words: “That crap is for rich
people who hate themselves.” But this is only in her initial, naive
phase, before she becomes not just Kate’s surrogate but the Galatea
to her Pygmalion. In the end we ooh and ah not just over the baby
or babies who will inevitably be involved but also over Angie’s
testimony to Kate to the effect that “I know I was supposed to help
you have a baby, but you ended up teaching me how to be a
mother.”
The smugness and snobbery of this conclusion are deeply
unattractive to me, suggesting as they do that being a (proper)
mother is more or less synonymous with observing all the
upper-middle class fetishes about diet and exercise and natural
childbirth and reading the multitude of manuals on the subject
rather than being, as it often is in real life, a much more natural
part of life for women of Angie’s social class than it is of
Kate’s. It is some tribute to Mr. McCullers and Miss Fey that this
doesn’t destroy either the comedy or the romance, which comes in
the form of Greg Kinnear’s burnt out lawyer — a man who seems to
be making a remarkably good living selling smoothies in a depressed
neighborhood of Philadelphia — but it does leave a taste in the
mouth as bad as that of the kelp, the rejection of which at a
pretentious organic restaurant is meant to serve as an
advertisement of our heroes’ status, after all, as regular folks.
It didn’t persuade me, anyway.
