Babes

Grade: B+

I can’t imagine a critic writing about Babes without also mentioning Scrambled, out a few months ago. Neither is a copy of the other (Scrambled is more about the process of egg-freezing); each has its place, but they make great bookends for one another. Both movies are an irreverent, unflinching dive into so many aspects of women and their ups and downs with bodily functions during pregnancy. The elephants in the room that aren’t often talked about. If you haven’t been through that, because either you’re a man or a woman who doesn’t want children, it welcomes us into that world, and nobody is bashed.

Like Scrambled before it, the dialogue in Babes is the kind of heightened level of speaking usually reserved for stand-up comedy and sitcoms. Sometimes, that is to its detriment. It can be almost too witty, like everyone’s trying to win a one-liner contest. But because it plays convincingly enough, it’s not difficult to get over that. The comedic timing and banter between Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau make it easy to believe their characters have been best friends since childhood.

Glazer plays Eden, who was just there for the birth of Dawn’s (Buteau) second baby. Eden is single and childless. On her way home, she has a Meet Cute in the subway with a man who has the same lengthy “flight pattern” of New York City trains as her. They hook up, as she figures it’s a safe time of the month to have unprotected sex (“Let’s go ruin a towel,” she tells him). She finds herself pregnant. The screenplay abruptly removes the would-be-father from the picture, so Eden is left to do the future single mom thing.

The movie occasionally comes up for air with some sweet moments of poignancy. Oliver Platt, the great character actor, has one scene (in person) as Eden’s father. It’s a beautiful few minutes. We find out and understand so much, without clunky backstory dialogue spoon-fed to us. All performances shine. Glazer is charming and endearing as Eden. She is a new mother in real life, and at times, her pregnancy belly looks so convincing to my eyes that I wondered if it coincided with the filming. As a doctor, John Carroll Lynch (best known as the Zodiac killer) has a very amusing running joke involving his hair.

The ending is a good one for all the characters we care about, which, really, is everybody. I missed some lines in one of the last scenes because I was distracted from listening to the song playing under it. It’s the one that was used in such a great way in Garden State almost 20 years ago – and put that song back on the map for so many people. The version in Babes sounded like a cover. Maybe they couldn’t afford the original artist’s recording. It reminded me of my mild disappointment at hearing American Beauty end with a cover of The Beatles’ “Because” instead of the real deal. Babes is insightful and funny with characters and situations that rise above its sometimes too-slick script. Nobody is that clever in real life all the time, but Babes makes it easy to realize and accept that it’s a movie.

Grade: B+