Though Baby Mama
is being billed as a gal-friendly counterpart to the male-centric lens of the
Apatow Industry, it doesn’t try as hard or scratch as deep as the latter’s
better efforts, in ways both good and bad. Though its underlying themes--female
singlehood, motherhood, sisterhood--have resonance, they remain distinctly low
key: Its situations are fodder for situational comedy, not sociological exploration.
Romantic entanglements come and go and come back again, but no one seems much
wounded by them; single parenthood lurks, but only as a happy outcome, not a
difficult beginning. And, though the premise for the film is the anxiety of a
woman approaching 40, it’s an anxiety that remains largely unpacked. (Compare,
for instance, Kate and Angie’s goofy girls’-night-out clubbing experience with
the comparable sequence in Knocked Up.)
At the same time, perhaps because Baby Mama never takes itself too seriously, it rarely feels as
desperate for a laugh as the Apatow oeuvre, whose scatological excesses almost seem
a conscious counterweight to its emotional excavations. (Loneliness? Gay Joke. Growing
old? Fart Joke.) Does this make Baby Mama
a relatively safe, conventional Hollywood
comedy? It does indeed. But it’s an enjoyable one, and on some sunny spring days,
that is enough.
Christopher Orr is a
senior editor at The New
Republic.