Babes Review – Pamela Adlon’s Funny and Acerbic Pregnancy Comedy | Comedy Movies

MOtherness changes everything. Or so you think. However, Eden—Ilana Glazer, who also co-wrote the film and delivers her lines with a crackling, casual energy that hovers between the scatological and the zany—didn’t get that particular memo. A carefree, single yoga instructor from Astoria, Queens, she’s not about to let an unplanned baby derail her life. Her personality (big, loud, relentlessly hedonistic) is imprinted on every aspect of her pregnancy. Her birth plan includes helium balloons and tiaras; she’s already compiled a Spotify playlist of party songs for the delivery room. And to hold her hand throughout the film, Eden assumes that her childhood best friend Dawn (Michelle Buteau) will be holding her hand.

But Dawn has a demanding career and a family of her own: a newborn whose birth provides the extended comic set-piece that opens the film (and sets its forthright tone), and a three-year-old who turns to Satanism after Eden’s unorthodox babysitting (she lets him watch The Omen). Dawn is one diaper throw away from a meltdown. She has, quite frankly, more than enough shit to deal with without Eden’s input.

The first feature film by Pamela Adlon (co-creator, director and star of the American comedy series Better things), Babies The film takes a wry, uncompromising look at the horrific indignities of pregnancy, childbirth, and its seismic aftermath. It tackles, with macabre, maudlin delight, the realities that most films tend to gloss over when it comes to the subject of new motherhood: nipples chafed by the texture of corned beef, every sinew shredded into raffia, and a postpartum body that looks like someone ran a combine through it. It’s caustically funny, if occasionally awkward. Where the film really excels isn’t so much in the snappy, trash-talking vagina jokes, but in its insightful depiction of the shifting gears in a female friendship as the best friends begin to realize that their paths might diverge.

It is this element, plus the irrepressible alchemy between Glazer (co-creator and star of Wide city) and Buteau (First Wives Club, Survival of the thickest), which defines Babies apart from images on the same theme concerning unwanted pregnancies. There is a kinship with Baby madethe affable New Zealand comedy starring Rose Matafeo as a tree surgeon in denial about her impending motherhood; and, in the New York setting and abrasive humor, the independent film starring Jenny Slate Obvious child. And Babies shares with Judd Apatow Knocked up a taste for magic mushrooms and an occasional tendency to favor vulgar and shocking tactics over wit.

But while those other films focus on the pregnancy from the perspective of the expectant parents (who tend to end up in a relationship even if they weren’t at the time of conception), Eden’s baby’s father, Claude (If Beale Street Could Talk The main character, Stephan James, is abruptly removed from the equation. It’s a device that should be tragic but is defused by the sly absurdity of the scene in which we learn his fate. It’s a tonal gamble—it’s a comedic shift after the hilariously maximalist work scene that opens the proceedings—but it’s one that Adlon pulls off with poise and style.

This is clearly not an accident Babies references Nora Ephron at one point. While its dialogue is more graphically gynecological than any of Ephron’s high-spirited romantic comedies, you can sense, in the fleshed-out characters, complex relationship dynamics, and keenly observed comedy, that Adlon and screenwriters Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz are on the same wavelength as Ephron, with the same droll humanism and warmth.

It won’t work for everyone. Some viewers may prefer a gentler treatment of female anatomy. And Glazer’s full-throttle assault on acting is a potential turnoff for others. There’s little opportunity to catch your breath during the rapid-fire onslaught of dialogue. She is certainly, as the character herself admits, “a lot.” Ultimately, though, Babies disarms us with an unexpected, heartfelt conclusion and a message that friendships, like marriages, are worth fighting for. And any movie that takes such extravagant, destructive revenge on a breast pump gets my vote.

In British and Irish cinemas