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'Baby Mama'

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BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

April 25, 2008

What may be the first real outsourcing comedy, "Baby Mama" is like a pacifier: floppy, nourishment-free and may even keep your teeth from growing in straight. It stars the likable Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as a wannabe mother and her trailer-trash surrogate, but it's mild to the point of pabulum, taking a pretty fertile topic - surrogate motherhood - and making it inoffensive to anyone. This is not an endorsement.

Every pregnancy is a rerun, no? And while we may have said this before, most recent Hollywood comedies are ripe with déj ... vu. In 1987, Diane Keaton starred in "Baby Boom," about a exec whose life melts down when she inherits a baby. In "Baby Mama," Kate Holbrook (Fey) has likewise been winning the boys' game at Round Earth, a natural-foods chain owned by the crunchy Barry ( Steve Martin). But when she hears the call of the nursery, she desperately wants to answer. Having no husband, no prospects, and a million-to-one shot of conceiving, she seeks out Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler). The two become mismatched wombmates.

There are funny moments in "Baby Mama," but moments only. Writer-director Michael McCullers has written for Poehler and Fey's "Saturday Night Live," so "Baby Mama's" lack of coherence shouldn't be surprising (it's one of the many plagues of the "SNL"-begotten, big-screen product: skit comedy). Angie is incredibly trashy one minute, reasonable and inquisitive the next; she's as stupid as each scene requires her to be, with no overall narrative or character. Fey is not an actress; the sense she gives is that she's so very happy to know you're so happy she's here. Still, the best scenes in the film are between her and Greg Kinnear, who plays Rob, the ex-lawyerinevitable love interest. Their spark, of course, accentuates all the collateral phoniness of the film (with the exception of Romany Malco, who's flat-out funny as Kate's doorman-sounding board).

What's also funny is how "Baby Mama" glides over anything relating to the mechanics of motherhood. Oh well. The sidekicks are good - Martin is perfectly supercilious; Siobhan Fallon Hogan is wacky as a birthing-class instructor-Elmer Fudd-soundalike. Kinnear brings a solidness the movie otherwise lacks. All in all, though, the comedy is developmentally disabled. Delivery, after all, is everything.

Four funny faces of Fey

Remember this? For four reasonably memorable years, Fey and Jimmy Fallon hosted "Weekend Update," one of those on-again/off-again "Saturday Night Live" iconic in-show fixtures that went through some good years and some lean ones. Fey's stint fell in the former camp; Fallon left in '04 to be replaced by (guess?) Amy Poehler.

Decked out in an assortment of NYC regalia for this Dec. 15, 2001, appearance on "SNL," Fey was joined by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his second of the season. The first came just two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, when Lorne Michaels opened the show by asking, "Can we be funny?" Rudy: "Why start now?"

In the 2004 hit "Mean Girls," Fey played Ms. Norbury, the fashion-challenged, divorced, snotty, angry, cynical, big-hearted teacher who earns an unkind entry in the Mean Girls' "Burn Book," authored in part by Lindsay Lohan's Cady Heron. Fey also wrote the screenplay for film, pretty much sealing her creds as a Hollywood star scribe.

Ah, Liz Lemon, the fashion-challenged, luckless-in-love, somewhat-unbalanced, big-hearted head writer of "TGS" who (in "SeinfeldVision") starts to crack up when she and (yet another) boyfriend split up and she ponders (sort of) the meaning of love and wedding dresses. This was a classic "30 Rock" (October 2007) with Jerry Seinfeld cameos, literally, in all of NBC's shows.

BABY MAMA (PG-13). Gynecomedy: With her biological clock nearing midnight, overachiever hires dubious young woman to carry her baby. Detecting human life here would require a sonogram. With Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Romany Malco. Written and directed by Michael McCullers. 1:36 (adult content, vulgarity, drug content). At area theaters.