The line between arrested development and living your best life is a fine one. In Ilana Glazer’s penned Babes, it all but doesn’t exist, with characters who are forced into adult roles despite still feeling like they are still children themselves. Pamela Adlon’s feature directorial debut sees Eden (Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) both dealing with motherhood and navigating their intense friendship through a feminist lens that evokes the best of Nicole Holofcener.
Dawn is a dentist with her life supposedly together. She has a loving husband, Marty, (Hasan Minhaj) and a brand new second child, but below her nurturing surface, she is drowning under the pressure of being a woman who “has it all”. Her more free-spirited yoga instructor best friend Eden is on a first-name basis with her local STI clinic employees, but after an ill-fated tryst with Claude (Stephan James) opts for single motherhood. Despite Eden recognising that Dawn is struggling to keep her many plates spinning, she still intends to rely on her friend to form the village that raises her child. Both characters, despite outwardly having very different lives, are engaged in childish self-delusion and turn to each other to substantiate that they are both perfect and making wise choices.
The film balances nuanced portrayals of female codependence with slapstick. Grief and existential dread punctuate scenes where a gentle trickle of amniotic fluid collects and a breast pump is a device of psychological torture. It subverts many of the major pregnancy cliches – there are no screaming rushes to the hospital after an explosive water breaking – and instead there are the true horrors of colostrum, raspberry leaf tea, and being told you might kill your baby if you lie on your back for a bit.
Adlon brings weight to her subject but never lets it get in the way of a good time, with a propensity for visual humour a gynaecologist’s hair transplant evolving over 9 months never gets old and is even funnier when juxtaposed with the sensitive way he delivers medical care to a terrified Eden. Needles casually brandished by doctors resemble small spears and somehow even pregnancy massages are cruel and unusual punishments but the film is more interested in the complexities of the dynamic between Dawn and Eden than poking fun at pregnant bellies.
When Eden laments that these new additions that Dawn is prioritising (aka her husband and children) over their established “family”, that betrayal is not histrionic but speaks to a genuine sense of betrayal, where one half of a sincere platonic love story has been cast aside in favour of hetronormativity. Ludicrous and immature as that outwardly seems, it’s heartbreakingly honest and just one of the ways that Babes uses motherhood as a way to explore how growing up often feels like losing who you truly are.
Buteau and Glazer bring a subtle wisdom to the roles, which is only further illuminated by Adlon’s musical direction that enhances both’s comic timing. Even in the most crass jokes, where fluid pours out of orifices, Babes delightful and profound study in growth.
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ANTICIPATION.
Adlon’s Better Things is a masterwork, but the last time Glazer tackled pregnancy in False Positive things got weird. 3
ENJOYMENT.
I laughed, I cried, I gagged at the memory of raspberry leaf tea. 4
IN RETROSPECT.
A true bundle of joy. 4
Directed by
Pamela Adlon
Starring
Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau
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