Babes, a friendship/pregnancy comedy written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, bears all of the hallmarks of the duo’s previous collaboration: the snappy, zany comedy, Broad City.
It should be noted, however, that while the film is filled with jokes that are both sexual and profane, Babes is grounded in relatable human drama. In that capacity it has the vibe of a Judd Apatow film (or more specifically, given the director, Pamela Adlon’s Better Things).
Eden (Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) have been best friends since they were 11 years old, and despite embarking on very different paths in adulthood, their lives remain firmly intertwined.
Eden is something of a wild child: she runs a yoga studio out of her (gigantic, gorgeous) apartment, does a lot of recreational drugs, and is sexually active enough to know the twins working at the STI clinic on a first name basis.
Dawn, on the other hand, is more settled. She’s a dentist, married to a near-perfect man, Marty (Hasan Minhaj) and has two children (a toddler and a baby on the way).
The film begins with Dawn going into labour on Thanksgiving and catalogues the next year of their lives. After being booted out of Dawn’s hospital room, Eden has a late-night meet cute with actor Claude (Stephan James) on the subway, who just so happens to share her commute. The pair strike up a conversation as they make the many transfers home and ultimately wind up in bed together.
These early scenes do a great job of establishing Dawn and Eden’s hilarious, albeit borderline co-dependent friendship, as well the great chemistry between Eden and Claude. The latter is vital because it explains why Eden decides to keep the baby after she accidentally gets pregnant, despite being single, living on a fourth floor walk-up, and lacking a support network beyond Dawn, who lives forty minutes away and has her own family issues to contend with.
The film lives and dies on the strength of its performances and, in that capacity, Babes is a slam-dunk. Glazer and Buteau are gifted comediennes, talented in delivering (heh) both wordplay and physical comedy. Just as importantly, they also have great chemistry that makes their friendship feel believable and lived-in.
It doesn’t hurt that the film is frank and unapologetic about women’s bodies in a way that still feels revelatory. Everything is on the table, including scat jokes during birth, having sex on your period, Post-Partum depression, and feeling like a failure if you can’t breastfeed. Many of these conversations are crude in a way that draws easy comparisons to films like Bridesmaids and Knocked Up, but Babes is far more effortlessly female-oriented and, ultimately, relationship-driven.*
*Another, under the radar comparison, is last year’s Joy Ride, albeit without the romantic love interest subplots.
The film is, at its core, about Eden and Dawn. In part this is because Claude is out of the picture and exists as a mere memory, but also because Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script is not-so-secretly interested about how friendship changes when you have children.
If the film has one drawback, it is that it is very beholden to the conventional relationship comedy narrative structure that features a) a very funny start b) a high stakes, slightly convoluted misunderstanding, and c) a dramatic, joke-lite final act.
In the case of Babes, the falling out between Dawn and Eden occurs far too suddenly and there’s not enough time spent on their efforts (or lack thereof) to reconnect in the interim before the inevitable reunion. It’s odd because the film clocks in at 1 hour 50 minutes, so it’s already quite long, which makes the last act feel a bit uneven and oddly paced.
Overall, Babes is a touch too long, but it works because of the strong character work between Glazer and Buteau and the frank female-focused comedy. Fans of either comedienne should already be lining up for tickets. 4/5
Other Observations:
- Adlon’s direction is mostly unobtrusive (she knows how to set up a scene and let Glazer and Buteau do their thing), though it is worth noting how tightly the opening scenes move from the movie theatre to the fancy West Side restaurant to the hospital as Dawn slooooowly acknowledges that she’s in labour.
- The recurring “biiiiiitch” joke, in which Dawn and Eden say the word in different ways back and forth to one other, is amusing, though it does go on a little too long the second time around.
- One recurring joke that is very amusing – in a quiet way – is John Carroll Lynch‘s droll gynaecologist. The character is struggling with hair loss and has a different (often ineffectual) solution each time Eden visits.
- The joke about the giant needle, which is featured in the trailer, is much longer and, as a result, much funnier in the film.
- Oliver Platt has a *tiny* role as Eden’s self-declared bad dad, and it’s amazing what he accomplishes in just a few minutes of screen time. Sad, funny, and fleeting. It’s a great cameo.
- There’s something to be said for putting Minhaj in the “straight man” role; he does get to be funny a few times, but more often than not he’s the audience proxy: an outsider looking in at Eden and Dawn’s friendship with a mixture of bemused befuddlement.
- Also: points for never making Marty the asshole who demands that Dawn end the friendship or blames Eden for their problems because that would have been an easy, clichéd thing to do.
- Finally, this film *loves* New York in a way that feels very Broad City, but also very late 90s rom-com. Let’s talk about housing prices in desirable boroughs in between shots of the subway and unimpressed New Yorkers on the streets.
Babes is in theatres Friday, May 24