“Babes” revels in the hideousness of pregnancy

I cried at the end babes, although I thought it didn't work that well for most of its runtime. That's how movies can be funny, they leave you indifferent for long stretches and then hit you with an emotional moment that's all the more powerful because you weren't expecting it. The film is Better things Creator Pamela Adlon's directorial debut stars Michelle Buteau and Ilana Glazer as lifelong friends who took different paths to motherhood. It's a comedy based on pregnant women's right to be disgusting, a cause I fully support, with jokes about whether a “light drizzle in the pussy” counts as a ruptured water or whether there's still time to stop and Food remains. But however justified, the desire to reclaim an experience that has been sanctified, politicized and cloaked in euphemisms is a pretty abstract thing to base a film on, and babes is so invested in delivering extended jokes about lactation anxiety-induced hallucinations and the size of amniotic fluid needles that it ends up feeling (I'm so sorry) labored. The final scenes are one of the few scenes where the film simply allows itself to be guided by its characters, whose attempts to maintain a best friendship despite the vagaries of adulthood become sweet and extremely bittersweet in this moment.

Dawn (Buteau) is the common half of this duo, a dentist who lives with her husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj) in an Upper West Side townhouse and gives birth to a second child at the beginning of the film. Eden (Glazer) is the Chaotic One, a yoga instructor who works out of her Astoria loft (aka the Fourth Floor Walk-Up Studio) and is actively single enough to form a close relationship with the owners of her local STI testing clinic. There's a familiar dynamic – the tone of the film is more distorted Broad city as Better things – although babes offers a twist. When she becomes pregnant after an MTA meeting with a handsome actor named Claude (Stephan James, brutally sacrificed for plot purposes), Eden decides to keep the baby and follow her best friend into motherhood. Eden assumes that with Dawn by her side, she will confidently move forward into single parenthood, unaware of how overwhelmed Dawn is already with everything going on in her own life.

There's a lot to explore here, from the upper-middle-class precarity that surrounds Dawn and Marty's double-income Manhattan life to the fact that Eden, whose agoraphobic father Bernie (Oliver Platt), is silent for a scene Pathos emerges, really has no one else in her life that she can rely on besides her best friend. But babesThe emphasis is on pregnancy humor, often at the expense of the characters' emotional development. The doctor (John Carroll Lynch) explains that “genetic testing is it Necessary racist” and a hormonal Eden who gets upset about phallic vegetables and stages a Beyoncé-style flower and veil photo shoot for himself. With these gags comes an unmistakable sense of catharsis, a relief at being able to bring these experiences to the screen. But that doesn't change the fact that they're just not necessarily funny, because they rely entirely on recognition – the “You might be a pregnant person if…” approach to laughter. Parents deserve to be honest about what they're going through as much as anyone else, but don't they also deserve proper joke construction?

Glazer, who wrote the screenplay babes also co-wrote and starred in the 2021 horror film along with Josh Rabinowitz False positive, a completely different pregnancy story. While Glazer's journey to motherhood seems to inform her work, the part she wrote for herself here feels static, another variation on the outspoken character she played on the sitcom that gave her her breakout age, older, but not wiser. babes The film leans towards Eden, but I wish it would focus on Dawn instead, and not just because Buteau is such an appealing presence – someone capable of unexpected bursts of chaos. Dawn's perspective is potentially more surprising because she is faced with another person who expects to be dependent on her, but also because she, more selfishly, struggles with losing the outlet she had than herself wanted to let go. Movies tend to reinforce found families as an uplifting image at the end, but babes starts there and goes back to the question of how stable these bonds can be when compared to the more immediate needs of a partner and children, as well as the stress of simply making ends meet. If these relationships are not actively chosen and affirmed, they can easily wither. The best thing babes It shows this and then provides a counterpoint to the idea that these are just the realities of growing older and growing apart.