Pregnancy Comedy Babes Brings Real Women’s Bodies to a Fantasy World
Eden (Ilana Glazer) jostles her sour-gummies-in-popcorn to take a closer look at her best friend’s pussy. They’ve met to maintain their decades-long tradition of seeing a movie on Thanksgiving, but Dawn (Michelle Buteau) is seriously pregnant, so it’s worth a peek. Sure enough, the syncopated rhythms dripping onto Eden’s phone signal that labor has started, even if it wasn’t the expected “woosh” we see in the movies. Babies are ready when they’re ready. By the time the title credits for Babes slide in on the hospital elevator doors, Dawn has left a steady, hilarious stream of screams and fluids in her wake.
Pamela Adlon’s charming debut feature, Babes (co-written by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz) feels like a film from yesteryear rolled around in its filmmakers’ musical senses of comedy. Over their year together, Eden and Dawn go through many of the predictable ups and downs you might expect in any female friendship movie of the last 15 years. Eden sees Dawn through a difficult postpartum stage, helping her and her husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj) adjust to life with a second child and lending moral support (or mushrooms) where needed. In return, Dawn validates Eden’s carefree lifestyle, just as she’s done every day over the decades of their friendship. But when Eden suddenly becomes a single mom, it tests their codependency. Bonds are stressed, and distance happens for the first time.
Through it all, we know everything is going to work out. Everything, from the plot to the jokes, is a setup for a payoff. Even if, thematically, we’re shown that there’s no such thing as “perfect timing,” Babes has very sharp comedic rhythms. Adlon’s deadpan and dead-to-rights style of directing that we saw on FX’s Better Things fits perfectly with Glazer’s silly, expressive and improvisational style, while moving effortlessly to support Buteau’s planted and direct approach. Together, they celebrate all different kinds of comedy in the same way Babes delights in the diversity of women’s experiences.
Babes finds heart and humor in its honesty about bodies. There’s a noticeable intention to be frank about all the gory details of pregnancy, birth, motherhood and all the labor that women do. They’ll talk about the hemorrhoids, the tearing, the exhaustion with men and the way pumping machines make one’s nipples unrecognizable—all with the hope of destroying the complexes women have about their bodies. But in critiquing the sanitized varnish put over women’s biology and birth specifically, Adlon and Glazer end up swapping one veneer for another.