Comedies about people who refuse to grow up tend to be about men (howls of “oh no they don’t”), but Pamela Adlon’s feature debut, Babes, reminds us that women get stuck too. If that doesn’t grab you as a concept, what if I just say Babes is Booksmart for grown-ups? Ish ish ish.
Clever, funny, earthy, it’s co-written by Ilana Glazer (with Josh Rabinowitz), who also co-stars, and follows two lifelong friends through the birth of children into a choppy patch and out into calmer waters on the other side, wisecracking all the way, in that smart New York way.
We meet Dawn (Michelle Buteau), heavily pregnant with her second child, and perma-singleton Eden (Glazer) on their annual movie excursion on Thanksgiving Day, where they give the guy in the ticket booth several servings of lip before entering to watch a movie (and talk all over it) in the almost deserted movie theatre.
In a swift one, two, three Dawn’s waters break, she ends up in hospital giving birth to a baby and Eden winds up heading home alone, meeting a sweet guy (Stephan James) en route and striking up a conversation that turns into something more.
Most of the plot is up here at the front. For the rest of the movie a suddenly-pregnant Eden bumps towards motherhood, getting bigger and more encumbered, while new mother Dawn becomes increasingly exasperated with her friend’s demands on her time and her patience.
Considering it happens to about half of the humans on the planet, childbirth and new motherhood as a seam for comedy, rather than horror, is oddly underdone. Glazer and Rabinowitz go at it by focusing on the stuff people don’t often talk about – the length of an amniocentesis needle, haemorrhoids, labial tears, shitting in the delivery room while squeezing out the new arrival – while Eden increasingly waddles and bloats. Glazer does actually look pregnant, especially in the scene where she sits on the floor to shower, rolling around to get up again. A fat suit plus clever computer graphics, maybe.
Plausible, however it’s done. I’m not entirely sure how plausible the rest of it is. The insistence on cracking wise becomes a touch wearisome after a while. Both Glazer and Buteau have a background in stand-up and Babes eventually starts to suffer from stand-up-itis, the sense that of being bombarded from the stage and a heckle will be met by a devastating put-down. Occasionally I wanted to say, “Please stop talking.”
When it backs off a bit, Babes is great. Funny, rude and warm, hitting its sweetest spot when it abandons the comic indignities of pregnancy and childbirth to examine the joys of long-term friendship and the struggles of growing up.
Glazer has been here before, to an extent, in the 2021 comedy False Positive, which she also co-wrote, and which featured Pierce Brosnan as a demon obstetrician. It was a much more grand guignol take on the same thing, a Rosemary’s Baby slight return.
With the likes of John Carroll Lynch (Eden’s obstetrician), Sandra Bernhard (Dawn’s boss) and Oliver Platt (her dad) in the cast (quite briefly in the case of Bernhard and Platt), it won’t come as a surprise that there’s no horror agenda here.
And there’s a nice deadpan turn by Elena Ouspenskaia as Eden’s doula, suddenly necessary when Dawn backs out, a succession of Buster Keaton stonefaces that leave you wanting more of her.
It knows, as it enters pinky-promises and best-friend-forever territory that it’s skirting the edges of Hallmark cards cuteness, hence that “The End” in a curlicued font at… the end. But that’s OK. In among the gross sight gags and salty language Babes is a little bundle of joy.
Babes – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
