Baby Mama: Things Yuppies Like

Michael McCullers wrote and directed Baby Mama. The film centers on Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey), vice-president of an organic food retailer. Personally, I have never gotten the obsession with organic food. Maybe I have read too much media sponsored by Monsanto, but I don't worry too much about the pesticides agribusiness sprays on my tomatoes. I prefer my food without the insect protein. Kate has difficulty conceiving her own child due to a "T-shaped uterus," so she pays Chaffee Bicknell, a surrogacy service, to match her with a surrogate mother.

Kate discovers that the head of Chaffee Bicknell is a middle-aged woman named Chaffee Bicknell (Signourney Weaver). Bicknell provides Kate with foil / surrogate Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler). After Ostrowiski has a major fight with her boyfriend Carl Loomis (Dax Shepard), she moves in with Kate. Kate immediately takes charge of the care of Angie and her baby, but Angie resists. Unlike Kate, Angie hasn't accomplished much in her life and prefers real food over wheat grass and blue green algae. Angie dismisses health food Kate offers her as stuff for "rich people who hate themselves."

The clash of the two lifestyles provides much of the humor. I don't think there are enough movies that so successfully lampoon yuppies as Baby Mama does. Kate and Angie attend birthing classes where the instructor disapproves of childbirth with any kind of medicinal pain alleviation. As part of the pre-birthing regiment, the instructor encourages partners to rub olive oil on the mother's "taint." Kate's entire lifestyle follows all the yuppie clichés. She has a coffee table made from reclaimed barn wood. She drinks fruit smoothies. Entertainment companies, retailers, and other corporations cater to this kind of people, so it's wonderful to see a film take them down a peg.

Kate's boss Barry (Steve Martin) is the most outrageous self-absorbed yuppie of the film. He visits with Oprah at her home in Maui. He relates a story about a tiny seashell that he stepped on as he ran across the beach and instructs Kate to make the new store "like this shell." Barry rewards Kate's hard work on the new store with five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact. To Barry, five minutes of his undivided attention is a special gift of the highest order. He's into eastern spirituality and has traveled extensively around the world.

Baby Mama is a delight for cultural studies. It is topical for the early 21st century. When Kate and Angie attend a surrogacy support group at Chaffee Bicknell, viewers see who they'd expect to see there. They meet the Wiccan who carries a baby for a devout Methodist couple, who are somewhat uncomfortable with the mother's faith. The other couple is a gay couple, and one of the men is "manorexic." I thought maybe Kathy Griffin had written the film. Surrogacy itself is topical--look no farther than Juno.

The movie at times presents a matriarchal view of society, at others the more traditional patriarchal. Both Kate and Chaffee are successful women, and eventually, both become mothers. It reveals a moment of humorous phallogocentrism when Barry whispers the secret of success to Angie: "have a big penis." Despite the artlessness of the movie, I enjoyed it.