We saw Baby Mama last week and we really enjoyed it. It was entertaining and Steve Martin did a fantastic job as Kate’s (Tina Fey) boss – the yoga practicing, spiritual, pony-tailed founder and CEO of Round Earth foods (think Whole Foods). Martin’s small role stole the movie and carried it through a predictable plot, which was further buoyed by the likes of Sigourney Weaver, in an atypically humorous role. If only Holland Taylor was in the film more, then it would have really been fabulous.
Whilst the supporting characters are great, Kate and Angie (Amy Poehler) are good, but unable to top some of their co-stars performances. They are both in their element in roles that they have time and again proven they can execute. Kate is a successful, intelligent, and simultaneously goofy, yet sexy urban professional that Fey has mastered on 30 Rock. In contrast, Angie is a working-class woman with a loud inner-child who is both caring and in need of constant supervision. Poehler’s seemingly endless energy and wide-eyed innocence is quite funny and amusing. Her performance is more a caricature of, dare I say, “white trash.” It’s reminiscent of Poehler’s recurring SNL character, Kaitlin, the spastic ADD girl whose constant questions and limitless energy drives her step-father, Rick (Horatio Sanz) crazy.
This leads me to one of the film’s most intriguing and perhaps its true plot: the role of class, as it relates to both parenting and society more generally. While the film is clearly about Kate’s inability to conceive and hence her need of a surrogate (“baby mama”), Angie, it is more a tongue-in-cheek look at modern urban, yuppie parenting and lifestyle. Angie and her “common law” husband (Dax Shepard) are, in contrast, the working-class “white trash” couple who find themselves confronted by and scrutinized for their lifestyle. I laughed out loud when Kate drops Angie off at home with bags of organic groceries from Round Earth for which Angie responds, “That crap is for rich people who hate themselves.” Anthony Lane, in the April 28th issue of the New Yorker, also identifies this theme in the film describing it as “an old-fashioned scuffle over class.” And Hollywood has a long history rich with a fascination with class that manifests itself through comedy (It Happened One Night, anyone?) so it is no surprise that contemporary Hollywood has chosen to use pregnancy and parenthood as a vehicle to further the genre.
I must say, behind the jabs of class humor, there are some precious kernels of truth. Kate goes stroller shopping and is sold when the salesman (Fred Armisen) shows her a top-of-the-line SUV of strollers with side-impact airbags – how many of us spend upwards of $500 on “must-have” strollers? Guilty. And that organic food that Angie says, “…is for rich people who hate themselves,” well, rich or not, eating organic certainly makes people feel better about themselves (and the environment). Again, guilty. My point is this, the movie is not just an enjoyable comedy, but if you take a closer look, then you will find yourself (or someone you know) reflected back at you with some semblance of truth.
