“I just don’t like your uterus.”
That’s hardly the thing a gal wants to hear, especially coming from her gynecologist.
But, that’s the news 37-year- old Kate gets in “Baby Mama,” a gentle, laugh-inducing comedy starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as a successfully “green” businesswoman and the urban hick she hires to carry her baby.
Nixed at adoption agencies, failing countless p-stick tests, Kate goes to the Chaffee Bicknell agency, where they “outsource,” ahem, connect, hopeful parents with women who’ll carry their fertilized eggs to term.
After all her careful vetting of sperm donors, Kate agrees to pay Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler) and common-law hubby Carl (Dax Shepard), to carry her baby. Desperate times call for desperate alliances.
Sigourney Weaver retrofits ever so perfectly her supercilious character from “Working Girl” to become Chaffee herself. She never plays the upscale Philadelphia maven at an ironic remove. Yet the jokes made at Chaffee’s expense are among the funniest.
Written and directed by Michael McCullers, “Baby Mama” nurses a number of contemporary issues: The richest might be class.
A support group for future parents and their surrogates includes a Methodist couple and their young Wiccan surrogate. No one seems particularly at ease with their arrangements.
Not only is there the tension between future mom and her quasi-partner in parenthood once Angie moves into Kate’s orderly apartment, there’s the subtension of Kate’s company making an incursion into a transitioning Philly neighborhood.
Round Earth Organic Market’s founder is Barry (Steve Martin), an oozy New Age floozy who name-drops faster than the jet he no doubt flies.
Martin doesn’t bring much fresh to this entrepreneur with a silver ponytail. But those who chuckle at the Whole Foods’ “Whole Paycheck” nickname will appreciate the jabs.
When Angie tells Barry she sees the aura of his newest store as green, he adds, “As in money?”
Greg Kinnear gives a relaxed turn as Rob, owner of Super Fruity, a smoothie company and potential love interest for Kate.
“Baby Mama” is often funny-wise about notions of who “the man” is. Rob guns for Jamba Juice, though his own store suggests local demand for his offerings is muted.
McCullers has penned a comedy in which hypocrisy and ethical unsteadiness get teased, not lambasted. “Baby Mama” makes fun of the methods, not the emotions, behind its characters’ desires.
Kate wants to be a mom. Angie, uneducated but curious, wants to get ahead in life even if it means taking advantage of Kate.
For all Chaffee’s highfalutin riffs on “gestation assistants,” it’s doorman Oscar (Romany Malco, Conrad on “Weeds”) who breaks it down for Kate: “She’s your baby mama.”
The vernacular suggests orderly arrangements and contracts can get upended by crazier connections.
The appealing Fey and nutty Poehler make sure “Baby Mama” dramas comes leavened with laughs.
“Baby Mama”
PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and a drug reference. 1 hour, 39 minutes. Written and directed by Michael McCullers; photography by Daryn Okada; starring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard, Romany Malco, Maura Tierney, Holland Taylor and Sigourney Weaver. Opens today at area theaters.
