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Friday, April 25, 2008
Tina Fey carries Baby Mama to mild laughs
I found Baby Mama mildly funny, but I might have found it hysterical if it were a Tina Fey movie instead of a movie with Tina Fey in it.
Let me explain the difference. There’s never really been a Tina Fey movie yet. The closest we’ve gotten is Mean Girls. She wasn’t the lead in that film, but it was still a Tina Fey movie of sorts because she wrote it, brilliantly adapting a nonfiction book about high school cliques.
Baby Mama, on the other hand, is a movie with Tina Fey in it. She makes for a very appealing leading lady, which helps Baby Mama succeed as well as it does. Nevertheless, something is missing, and that’s Fey’s sharpest wit. She didn’t write Baby Mama, except for an uncredited polish on a screenplay by her director and former Saturday Night Live colleague, Michael McCullers, who’s never directed before - and it shows.
McCullers’ premise certainly held promise. Fey plays a driven career woman who’s missing only one thing in life: a child. She’s not prone to conceiving, so she settles on a surrogate mom, an unscrupulous ne’er-do-well played by Fey’s former “Weekend Update” partner Amy Poehler, who is quite unsuited to motherhood, in more ways than one.
Unfortunately, McCullers is quite unsuited for directing. His timing on too many of the gags is sloppy, obvious, or both. When you can’t milk laughs out of Steve Martin, who plays Fey’s self-absorbed, Zen-like boss, your skills aren’t up to scratch.
McCullers relies too many times on a totally unnecessary doorman (Romany Malco) who basically spends the movie looking incredulous or saying variations of “Oh, hell no!” Other times, McCullers blows his gags. A scene of Poehler relieving herself in a sink might have been funnier if it had made sense for Fey to install a lock on the toilet months before the baby was due.
Despite these misfires, Poehler and Fey have undeniable chemistry. Their routines on “Weekend Update” were often the only funny parts of any given SNL episode. On the big screen, they’re still fun to watch, even with second-rate material. I wish Fey wasn’t so content to play the straight woman to Poehler’s wild child because Fey is funnier when she gets to crack jokes too, such as when she chides Poehler for finding America’s Funniest Home Videos to be the height of comedy. (“It’s a kid with a ball and a guy with a crotch. They’re going to hit.”)
Still, Fey has the chops to be a romantic lead, and Poehler surprised me by handling the emotional scenes just as well as she did the comic ones. These two are great together. Baby Mama shows they have potential to make something hilarious rather than mildly funny. All they need is a script and a director that they can carry to term. Maybe Fey might have done well to make What to Expect When You’re Expecting a laugh riot.
GRADE: B-
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