Babes

Given that pregnancy is quite literally a matter of life and death, it’s striking how few films address it. Blame the ickiness perhaps, or more likely the fact that it’s seen as a women’s issue, but Hollywood considers something that 40 per cent-odd of the population experiences and 100 per cent of the population owes their lives to a little bit less important than zombies. So one would like to cheer this effort from actor/comedian-turned-director Pamela Adlon, except that it’s inconsistent in its tone and fatally lacking in humour.

Our heroes are Eden (Ilana Glazer), a free-spirited yoga teacher who we meet as she shepherds her BFF Dawn (Michelle Buteau) through her second labour. Soon after, Eden meets Claude (Stephan James) and strikes up both a conversation and connection. Pregnancy results, and she decides to keep the child, demanding more and more of Dawn’s support even as her friend worries about her own family commitments.

There’s nothing wrong with the basic premise: contrasting a first pregnancy with someone struggling to manage a young familyis pretty solid. But there’s no sense that Eden’s rosy view of how things will work is being challenged by Dawn’s reality; in fact, Eden is blithely unaware and/or totally inconsiderate of Dawn’s stress for most of the runtime. Instead we get endless not-very-funny scenes of Eden spouting off about birth plans and loudly opining on her baby’s sex. Her scenes with James are better, with a real sense of chemistry and humour, but they’re too brief to dispel the suspicion that she’s sort of unbearable.

The more interesting struggle belongs to Dawn and her devoted husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj), as they worry about their older child regressing, Dawn’s efforts to breastfeed their baby and the search for a nanny. We see Dawn shift from life and soul of every situation to a shadow of herself; it’s a welcome chance for Buteau to take centre stage after too many best-friend roles. Even there, though, the film skips any sense of the massive economic shock all parents face, which can be as devastating as the physical trauma, and shies away from much consideration of what Dawn needs to get her groove back.

There are good moments here, with nice cameos from Oliver Platt as Eden’s agoraphobic father and Sandra Bernhardtas as Dawn’s supportive colleague, but not enough of them to counter the wild swerves between explicit body humour and effective moments of emotion. We need more pregnancy movies, yes, but this bun could have done with a little longer in the oven.