Babes
Seen at the 2024 Atlanta Film Festival
This is a comedy about motherhood, both impending motherhood and after the baby is born, but at it’s heart, Pamela Adlon’s film is about the ways adult life can put strain on friendships if two people are in different places in their lives. The bond between Dawn (Michelle Buteau) and Eden (Ilana Glazer) is immediate as we watch the opening scenes where they start by doing a Thanksgiving tradition, only to end up with Dawn having her second child, and Eden trying to eat $500 worth of sushi on a train. When Eden gets pregnant with a man whom she meets on that train’s baby, that friendship is tested when Eden thinks it’ll be a bonding situation with her ride-and-die, but things don’t turn out quite as she expects.
While there are a lot of moments in this film that are very funny, I think the sweetness of “Babes” is what sticks with me most. The first part of the movie especially displays this, as Eden and Dawn start by going to a movie, then a restaurant, thinking Dawn’s got time before she has to go to the hospital; while in the hospital itself, where we meet Dawn’s husband, Marty (Hasan Minhaj), we see that dynamic form, as well as how he fits in to the relationship between Dawn and Eden. When it gets too late for Eden to be at the hospital, she gets on the subway, where she meets Claude (Stephan James). The share sushi, Street Fighter and a one night stand that will get Eden pregnant. The way Claude doesn’t fit into the story from that point forward is a bit depressing, but it makes for a lovely bookend ending for the film. James and Glazer have wonderful chemistry together; we could have gotten a movie of them together and I would have been happy. But that isn’t the story- this is about two women who approach pregnancy, and motherhood, very differently, and it threatens to get in the middle of their lifelong friendship.
“Babes” is like a lot of modern comedies where they are proudly raunchy, but that is not a source for a lot of laughs. Many of the funniest moments are more rooted in characters, and how they react to certain things. That is very much the case with actors like John Carroll Lynch as the women’s OBGYN, and Oliver Platt as Eden’s awkward father. Ultimately, however, this is about Dawn and Eden, and the work by Buteau and Glazer- the latter of whom wrote the screenplay with Josh Rabinowitz- is what drives the film into its wildest, most emotional places. They deliver in spades.
