'Babes' review: Ilana Glazer's pregnancy comedy is hilarious

Someone needs to explain to me why Pamela Adlon's “Babes” opens this weekend. after Mother's Day. If ever a movie had a chance of becoming the “Love Actually” of Mother’s Day, it’s “Babes.”

Sure, it's rated R for sexual material, extensive language, and some drug use. But how surprising is that? It's written by the characteristically unfiltered Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz of “Broad City,” and anyone who's ever seen Adlon's FX comedy “Better Things” knows that she, too, appreciates the power of sexual material, language and the use of some drugs as maternal survival tools. .

If Hollywood has a patron saint of motherhood, it's Adlon, making her directorial debut; She understands that parenthood, like life, often seems pretty impossible and we do it anyway.

Working with the slightest hint of plot (the unexpected pregnancy of free-spirited single Eden (Glazer) causes some strain on her long friendship with Dawn (Michelle Buteau), who just had her second child), “Babes” is less interested in traditional narrative than exploding notions of motherhood that fetishize the belly but deny the biology of this culture.

Not in the creepy, life-or-death way of medical shows, including the more recent “This is Going to Hurt” or even “Call the Midwife,” but in the gaseous, oozing, painful, horny, hormonal, anxiously exhausted way. that many of us experience pregnancy and childbirth. So while there won't be blood, there will be poop, amniotic fluid, vaginal discharge, and breast milk, sometimes literally everywhere.

“The setting” is New York City, which is evoked, from the opening scene onward, by the romance between Woody Allen and “When Harry Met Sally” (Nora Ephron is eventually name-checked). Eden is a self-employed yoga instructor and Dawn is a dentist. The two grew up together in Astoria, Queens, where Eden still lives; Dawn has since gotten married and moved to the Upper West Side. Still, they remain loyal to their best friend, which includes the Thanksgiving tradition of going to the movies together, although it now takes Eden three trains to get to Dawn, who is very, very pregnant.

So pregnant that her water breaks in the theater. Instead of immediately heading to the hospital, where Dawn knows she'll be forced to endure labor and delivery alone with chunks of ice, the two feast on a hilariously huge, fancy lunch before it becomes clear that the birth is imminent.

The following “get her to the temper in time” sequence, as tense as any action movie and hilarious as any meet-cute, quickly establishes that Glazer's “Broad City” energy (unfiltered but always supportive) is alive and well. and that Buteau deeply understands the last stage of childbirth in which “no benefits are given.” “Don't touch me,” she yells at her husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj), echoing women of all time. .

After being kicked out of her hospital room after visiting hours, Eden begins her long journey home to Astoria during which she runs into Claude (Stephan James), an actor who has just done some background work in a movie. Scorsese. This leads, inevitably, to a romantic connection and possibly the most consensual, if reckless, unprotected sex in cinema history.

After being tricked by Claude, Eden discovers that she is pregnant and, for reasons that are never entirely clear beyond her demonstrably extravagant impulsivity, decides to have the baby with the firm belief that Dawn will help her every step of the way.

Which Dawn tries to do until her own life becomes overwhelming. Even with a remarkably supportive husband, being a working mom with a baby and a regressing 4-year-old is tough: “I feel like I have everything and nothing,” she says, which pretty much sums up those early sleep deprivations. years.

Eden, it must be said, has a remarkably easy pregnancy. Her main concern at all times is not her impending motherhood, but Dawn's increasing inability to accompany her to her appointments with her OB-GYN (played with profound humanity and very funny hair problems by John Carroll Lynch ).

Eden appears to have no other friends and her family consists of an agoraphobic father (Oliver Platt) who appears briefly to tell some good jokes and theorize that if he hadn't been such a terrible father, she might not have turned out so terrible. Well.

The very flawed reasoning of that bit of parenting advice aside, the brevity of Eden's scene with her father underscores the film's biggest flaw (beyond there never being enough Oliver Platt). Eden is a complicated mix of independence (she runs her own seemingly prosperous business) and an attractive but deep-seated need. She mentions in passing that her mother died when she was young, and Dawn is clearly, on some level, a replacement figure.

All of which makes her decision to become a single mother complicated. But the movie never delves much deeper than the notion that she simply needs to “grow up” (her apartment has a jukebox and a popcorn machine the size of a movie theater) and take responsibility for life. her.

At least that's what Dawn finally tells him. “Adults don't plan their lives around their best friends,” she says. “Best friends are screwed,” Eden responds, and for a moment “Babes” wrestles with the broader question of the definition of family in contemporary society.

What happens to a family made up of friends, which modern culture has sentimentalized with the zeal once reserved for romantic relationships, when they get married and have children? Dawn barely has the energy to mother her own children, much less Eden and hers; Eden feels betrayed that Dawn chooses her new relationships over her lifelong love, especially at a time when she is so vulnerable.

It's a universal problem and serves as the inevitable breakup scene that every romantic comedy demands. (“Best friends get screwed” is a great echo of Meg Ryan’s famous line “I’m not your consolation prize” from “When Harry Met Sally”).

“Babes” is not a deep reading of the many tensions that can threaten a friendship or even the difficulties of motherhood. At times it feels like a “Broad City” reunion episode, which isn’t a bad thing. Glazer and Buteau make their characters deeply believable in their differences and in their connection, the jokes are plentiful, beautifully told, and sometimes painful in telling the truth.

As Eden discovers, growing another body on your body is simply crazy; expelling it (or surgically removing it) seems literally impossible until it happens. Being handed a newborn when you yourself still need diapers and feel like you've been hit by a truck is categorically absurd. And yet, it happens every minute of every day.

So it's about time we had a movie that understands the basic truth of motherhood: you'll often be too tired to cry, but you'll never be too tired to laugh.