Baby Mama Boom

This weekend, I made the rare decision to go see a movie during opening weekend (Baby Mama). I though it was good (with the exception of some biological inaccuracies and some stuff that’s a little creepy in retrospect). But, it was better then any Will Ferrel nonsense I’ve seen in a while. Something struck my as interesting while I was watching it – in the movie, Tina Fey plays a V.P. of a Whole Foods-type supermarket chain. She has focused on her career and she is now past her child-bearing prime, which is why she ends up hiring Amy Poehler to be her surrogate. What funny about this is that it reminds me of Baby Boom, in a way. In the 1987 Diane Keaton movie, she plays J.C. Wiatt, who is also vying for partner at an ad agency (whose client is a supermarket, called Food Chain). In Diane Keaton’s case, her character has initially decided against motherhood in favor of career. Through the course of the movie, she inherits a baby (through a very convoluted circumstance) and decides to embrace motherhood and abandon her career. She moves to Vermont, where she eventually creates a line of gourmet baby food. At the end, she is offered a deal to take her Country Baby line national (with all the trappings of success), but she instead decides to stay small and spend time with her child. In Baby Boom, the generation seemed to say “You Can Have it All,” but with some sacrifices. In Baby Mama, her job initially distracted her from reaching her goal of motherhood, but it’s not an issue by the end. She seems to remain the same career girl she was at the beginning. What does this mean for a message? “You can have it all, but just don’t wait too long?” Or am I insane trying to infer a feminist message from a comedy where Amy Poehler wants to spray Pam on her hoo-ha?