Tina Fey can't carry 'Baby Mama' on the silver screen

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

April 25, 2008

(C) With everyone from the TV-awards circuit to Entertainment Weekly declaring Tina Fey the new queen of comedy, the producers of Baby Mama (including Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels) have treated her first star vehicle as a coronation. I love Tina Fey (who doesn't?), but you can start the crowning without me.

Playing a variation on the nice, sassy, confused single career-woman that she portrays on 30 Rock, Fey inhabits what should be her comfort zone as Kate Holbrook, a development vice president for a Whole Foods-like company (the wittily titled Round Earth). Told her chances of getting pregnant are one in a million because of her T-shaped uterus, she decides to use a surrogate to have a baby and ends up with raucous, declasse Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler).

The movie surrounds Fey with SNL veterans (in addition to Poehler, there's Will Forte and Fred Armisen), other late-night fixtures (The Daily Show's John Hodgman), top TV and stage actors (Maura Tierney and Holland Taylor), and wily, talented veterans ( Sigourney Weaver and Steve Martin). It even hands her the note-perfect Greg Kinnear as Rob, a former lawyer and current owner of a fruit-smoothie shop - just the warm yet ironical guy Kate needs for a satisfying family life.

But as the movie makes its way through betrayals and sitcom life lessons to a denouement that leaves everyone happy-ever-after, the film feels shakier and maybe emptier than your typical successful high-concept comedy. And part of the problem is the center will not hold.

As Kate, a Type A-Plus personality, Fey gets to show off her shrewdness-streaked graciousness and flash her ambiguous smiles. And when Kate first kisses Rob, you feel she really means it. Still, she comes off too bland and middling to carry a movie, even with this expert help.

She isn't nearly as sharp, funny or engaged as she is in the best episodes of 30 Rock, like the one in which Alec Baldwin set her up with Stephanie March because he thought she was a lesbian. There she could be naughty and nice and pull off the combination in a 22-minute surge of performing energy; here she's trapped in the straitjacket of an uptight character and she doesn't have the comedy-acting chops to individualize it.

In specific scenes that register as skits, she gets some giddy rhythms going with the game, gritty Poehler, who is funniest when every fiber of her body seems to be screaming "Give me!" Angie's the kind of lying, cheating dame devoted to immediate gratification but capable of redemption by the close. The two gals' disagreement on whether the cartoon cat-and-mouse team Tom and Jerry are enemies or friends is the cleverest thing in the movie, and the writer-director Michael McCullers must realize it, since he returns to it at the end.

Poehler wins her laughs - the Oscar in the Odd Couple always does - but whenever they're in a scene with Weaver or Martin, the TV stars go into a fade. Weaver was a natural for the movies from her very first substantial role (in Alien), and Martin swiftly learned how to channel his stand-up dynamism into character; they move across the big screen with refreshing confidence and ease.

Weaver could have been stuck in a one-joke role: a woman who heads a blindingly expensive surrogate service while she is supremely fertile herself. But as she showed in The TV Set (2006), Weaver knows how to use her towering presence and capacity for tunnel vision to craft a character who's amazingly and hilariously impervious to chaos or criticism. And Martin does one of his sublime riffs on fake omniscience as the founder of Round Earth foods, a deeply clueless counterculture capitalist. No one does freighted silence as well as Martin; his hesitations are more uproarious than his cast-mate's wisecracks.

Writer-director McCullers, himself an SNL graduate, creates no unifying and distinctive voice or look for the film, and shows no evidence of sensibility. He leaves you to catch laughs where you can, even from the cliches of Kate's devoted doorman (wily Romany Malco, who has sharpshooter eyes) and Angie's dumb, blustery boyfriend (the inventive, spluttering Dax Shepard). And Kinnear is so adept at romantic comedy - he's the rare actor who really can be simultaneously amorous and humorous - he carries Fey through their getting-to-know-you scenes.

But why does the birthing teacher played by Siobhan Fallon Hogan speak like Gilda Radner's Babwa Wawa? Is it homage or desperation? Why the endless stupid food-stuff jokes (and endless product placements for TastyKakes and Dr Pepper)? And do producers feel every dream must come true for a comedy to be a hit? In Little Miss Sunshine, almost no one's did, and that was a low-budget smash. By the time it reaches its supposedly crowd-pleasing finale, Baby Mama may have self-respecting comedy fans (and even Tina Fey fans) crying uncle.

>>>Baby Mama (Universal) Starring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear. Directed by Michael McCullers. Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and a drug reference. Time 96 minutes.

The name of the company Tina Fey's character works for was misidentified when this article was published in the print edition. The Sun regrets the error.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com