Big Picture Big Sound

"Mama" Queens

To its credit, "Baby Mama" is not your typical one-joke movie starring "Saturday Night Live" alums. It's more of a one-and-a-half joke movie. In "Mama", Tina Fey's OCD career woman, unable to conceive and unwilling to wait for an adoption, hires Amy Poehler's ADD surrogate mother to carry her baby. How will this odd couple survive nine months together? With hilarious results, of course. Well, moderately hilarious, at least, thanks in large part to its two seriously talented comedic leads.

While Ms. Fey took a supporting role in 2004's "Mean Girls", "Mama" has her front and center. Like Liz Lemon, her character on "30 Rock", Ms. Fey's Kate Holbrook is proudly 37. Kate is a successful business woman - Vice President of an organic foods company called Round Earth - whose biological alarm clock has suddenly gone off with a vengeance. She sees babies everywhere she goes - in the coffee shop, at the gym, in the boardroom. She even goes so far as to sneak a clandestine whiff of one in the elevator. She's got it bad. Stricken with a "T shaped" uterus, Kate is unable to conceive so, after a brief flirtation with adoption, she goes to an agency specializing in "gestation specialists". The agency is run by Sigourney Weaver in what could be an "Alien"-related gestation joke. Kate is saddled with Angie Ostrowiski (Ms. Poehler), a low-brow, Britney-level train-wreck with an even lower-brow common-law husband in tow (Dax Shepard, overstaying his welcome). Complications quickly ensue when Angie gets a common-law divorce and moves in with Kate.

From there, you can pretty much guess the rest. Kate must juggle her job (led by a perfectly smug, Branson-esque Steve Martin) while keeping Angie from wrecking her impeccably controlled life. Somewhere along the way, Kate meets Rob (Greg Kinnear, making his easy charm look even easier) and starts a tenuous flirtation, but their relationship holds even less tension than it does chemistry. Even the mention of Rob's 12-year-old daughter is glossed-over without even showing the poor girl. Maura Tierney even puts in an appearance as Kate's sister, but she has fewer lines than she does scenes.

"Mama" is written, with one contrivance too many, by Michael McCullers who co-wrote the last two "Austin Powers" movies. Mr. McCullers makes his directorial debut here but, even at 96 minutes, "Mama" eventually runs awfully thin. There are certainly some good moments, particularly when the two leads are given time to riff off each other. Ms. Poehler, in particular, is given a wide berth (pun intended). Ms. Fey however, so winning on the small screen, is put to the test here. As the consummate straight-woman, her range (and the script) is too limited to inject any real depth into the material. "Mama" treats the sensitivity of its topic with kid gloves - it's missing Ms. Fey's deft comic hand (the one that has made "30 Rock", against all odds, the best comedy on television). Even 1987's similarly-themed Diane Keaton vehicle "Baby Boom" held more weight. Even without a gestation specialist.