Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau star in Pamela Adlon’s exploration of motherhood and friendship. Here’s our Babes review.
Pregnancy is a juicy topic for filmmakers. You can play it for laughs, mine it for horror or simply showcase what an unbelievable process it is to grow a real human being inside you. Like pregnancy, motherhood is another popular subject for storytellers, as is friendship.
Trying to mesh all of these themes together in one film is Pamela Adlon, a first-time feature filmmaker and actress known as the voice of Bobby Hill in King Of The Hill. Babes is part comedy, part drama about the difficulties of maintaining a friendship through motherhood and pregnancy.
Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) are two life-long friends, who consider each other family. Dawn is an exhausted mother of two while Eden is a yoga teacher who has a one-night stand with Claude (Stephan James). As Eden finds out she’s pregnant and Claude isn’t in the picture any more, their friendship is stretched to its limits as both women struggle with their day-to-day life.
There’s a lot of insight in Babes. Like Jason Reitman’s Tully, it aims to be an unfiltered look at what women go through when they decide to have children. Dawn is struggling to find balance between her family and her career, while Eden comes to terms with the realities of being pregnant. In a way, Babes is the Superbad of pregnancy comedies with its gross-out humour about shitting on babies and shining a torch at your best friend’s vagina in the middle of a restaurant. It’s full of raunchy humour, but underneath it all is a really emotional core, even if Adlon often fails to bring it forth.
Written by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, Babes never seems sure about what kind of a film it wants to be. By trying to explore so many different avenues, the film doesn’t end up getting much out of any of them. It doesn’t say much new about friendship, motherhood or pregnancy that hasn’t already been said before in films that tackle one issue at a time.
It’s also difficult to see why the two women are still such close friends. Glazer’s Eden particularly comes across as irritating, childish and unbearable at times, and neither Adlon nor the film’s script do anything to ensure we reserve some empathy for her. Glazer can’t quite crack the character’s surface to let us in through the caricatured surface of the character.
Buteau fares better. Dawn is a more balanced character and her struggles are awarded more weight. Eden’s pregnancy is mostly played for laughs, but Dawn struggles to return to her career and keep her marriage alive while her eldest son is still attached to his dummy and diapers. There’s a universally recognisable quality to Dawn, and Buteau finds the perfect balance between tragedy and comedy in her performance.
Babes isn’t funny or tragic enough to be memorable. It only manages to scratch the surface of all these different themes that it introduces but leaves us wanting more. The premise would have made a far better TV show. There would have been more time to explore Eden’s pregnancy, which progresses remarkably fast in the film, and to bring more nuance to the story and the dynamic between the two friends. We certainly need more films like Babes, but we also deserve films that handle the subject matter better and in more detail.
Babes is in UK cinemas 9th August
