Birth dearth

National Review, May 19, 2008 by Ross Douthat

CAN infertility be funny? This is the first and most pressing question raised by Baby Mama, a cheerful little film premised on the theory that the "inhospitable" uterus of a late-30s professional woman can be mined for the same sort of laughs (and box-office dollars) delivered by last year's spate of unplanned-pregnancy comedies. Fifteen minutes into the film, I was ready to answer in the negative. However terrifying an unintended pregnancy may be, it's still a pregnancy, with a fundamentally happy outcome waiting at the end. Whereas the moments that can inspire laughs, however uncomfortable, when they're experienced by an unwed mother-to-be--going on bad dates, getting examined by inept doctors, visiting your judgmental mother and married-with-children sister-feel more like the stuff of tragedy when it's the absence of a child that's creating all the awkwardness.

The woman Baby Mama subjects to these indignities is Kate Holbrook, played by Tina Fey as a variation on the role she inhabits weekly on NBC's sitcom 30 Rock--a quick-witted Girl Friday who keeps a male-dominated institution from running itself into the ground. Here, she's the indispensable vice president at One Earth, a Whole Foods-style conglomerate run by a ponytailed, faux-hippie tycoon (Steve Martin, having a ball) who likes to sit Buddha-style on conference tables and begin his sentences: "This morning, while I was swimming with the dolphins ..." And Kate's star is on the rise, since One Earth is about to open a flagship store in her home city of Philadelphia; the project, her boss promises, will be her "baby."

But that isn't the baby Kate wants--and after fruitless trips to the adoption agency (five-year waiting list) and the doctor's office ("I don't like your uterus," he tells her, and puts the odds against conception at a million-to-one), she ends up opting for surrogate motherhood, through a firm run by a preening, outrageously fertile WASP played by Sigourney Weaver, who's pregnant with twins at 60. The firm, in turn, sets her up with Angie Ostrowiski, played by Fey's old Saturday Night Live castmate Amy Poehler, who's the gum-chewing, halter-top-sporting, Ho Ho-chomping, blue-collar antithesis of everything a Bobo like Kate considers sacred. And no sooner has the implantation taken place (or has it?) than Angie splits with her common-law husband (Dax Shepard) and shows up on Kate's doorstep, looking for a place to crash for the next eight months.

For a while, this plot twist looks like a solution to the "how do you make infertility funny" dilemma, since it promises to transform an uncomfortable comedy about sterility and surrogacy into a cutting satire about childbearing and class. (And even childbearing and race, since the plot throws in Romany Malco as Kate's black doorman, who lectures her on the "baby mama" phenomenon and notes, in passing, that he has two baby mamas of his own.) Fey and Poehler have great brunette-blonde chemistry, and their marriage of convenience--living together, going to Lamaze class and counseling together, going out (at Angie's urging) to clubs together--inspires some genuinely funny set-pieces. And the movie has fun with the peculiar culture of the socially conscious mass upper class--the smoothie bars and labor coaches, the absurd children's names ("Wingspan" and "Banjo") and the ubiquitous New Age nonsense.

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But the jokes are deliberately gentle, and the social commentary is superficial and ultimately inept. Baby Mama has the form of a satire but the soul of a lightweight romantic comedy, in which no differences--class, race, or even gender--really cut that deep, because everybody is basically an American yuppie at heart. Poehler's Angie, in particular, is the Pennsylvania high-school dropout that Barack Obama might have invented after a long day secluded with Jeff Foxworthy DVDs. You can tell she's supposed to be a redneck because she likes to sing along to American Idol video games, stick her gum under tables, dye her hair, and ogle tattooed guys in muscle shirts. But she talks in the savvy, ironic language of the haute bourgeoisie and lives in an apartment that most young Brooklynites would kill for--and inevitably, she just needs a little push from Kate to kick off a new career as a fashion designer.

So too with the other targets of Baby Mama's satire. The pious, big-money world of Whole Foods comes in for some gentle ribbing, true, but Kate ends up finding romance with the ultimate socially conscious businessman, a former corporate lawyer (Greg Kinnear) who quit the world of sharks and suits to peddle smoothies in a hipster neighborhood. Malco's doorman may have two illegitimate children, but the women he's knocked up are kept safely off stage, and in the final reel we see him hanging out with all the upper-middle-class white people, playing with one of his kids at a birthday party--just another yuppie parent, his skin color and doorman's uniform forgotten or transcended.

Then there's Kate herself. In a different, darker satire of the American upper middle class, her barrenness would be a corollary of her careerism, the bitter fruit of a life spent climbing the corporate ladder. But Baby Mama is at pains to make it clear that her infertility has nothing to do with her age; it's purely accidental, the result of an oddly shaped uterus rather than a badly plotted life course. And without the excuse of satire or social commentary, we're right back where we started: with a comedy premised on a condition that's about as funny as a diabetes diagnosis.