Babes (2024, dir. Pamela Adlon)

by Jack Martin | Aug 7, 2024

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 104 mins

UK Distributor: Universal Pictures

UK Release Date: 9 August 2024

WHO’S IN BABES?

Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, John Carroll Lynch, Hasan Minhaj, Stephan James, Oliver Platt, Kenny Lucas, Keith Lucas, Sandra Bernhard

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Pamela Adlon (director), Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz (writers, producers), Ashley Fox, Susan Fox, Breean Pojunas and Breean Solberg (producers), Jay Lifton and Ryan Miller (composers), Jeffrey Kim (cinematographer), Annie Eifrig and Elizabeth Merrick (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Two best friends (Glazer and Buteau) find their bond tested by unexpected motherhood…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON BABES?

In an unusually fitting metaphor, the pregnancy comedy Babes feels as though it is the biological mash-up of parents with two very different strands of DNA. One parent is a tender and grounded dramady with certain quirks not uncommon in other similar independent movies. The other parent is a much raunchier, juvenile and outlandish movie in the same vein as anything by the Farrelly Brothers in their heyday.

Clumped together, they form an often frustratingly uneven little human. But Babes, the directorial debut of actor and voice performer Pamela Adlon (whom you will have heard in everything from King of the Hill to Recess), at least has the decency to nurture this new delivery to decent enough strengths that just about overcome its blatant weaknesses.

The film centres on Eden (Ilana Glazer, also the film’s co-writer along with Josh Rabinowitz) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau), who have been best friends since childhood and still, even well into adulthood, make time for annual traditions like going to see a movie together on Thanksgiving. For Dawn, such traditions are becoming harder to keep since she’s now a mother to two young children with her partner Marty (Hasan Minhaj), but Eden is still eager to live her life to the fullest. However, it all comes crashing down when Eden falls pregnant herself after a one-night stand with Claude (Stephen James) – who, without getting to exact spoiler-heavy details, is out of the picture very quickly – but rather than submit to the struggles of single parenthood, she is determined to maintain her composure, especially with Dawn by her side… but with the latter juggling genuine responsibilities, it’s not long before the friends find themselves at odds with how they approach their child-centric lives.

To put it in a slightly less metaphorical sense, Babes is a film of two personalities, neither of which it seems entirely confident about leaning into, thereby rendering the final product a little messy and possibly even a bit schizophrenic. Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script clearly wants to explore a more realistic side of motherhood that tackles heavily relatable subjects like postpartum depression and the complications of maternity leave, but it also wants to have its cake and birth it by inserting joke after joke about bodily fluids, physical changes and whether or not the baby is going to come out with poo splattered all over it. It’s as though they wanted to make two kinds of Judd Apatow movies at once, combining the grounded nature of Knocked Up with the risqué humour of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but such an effect doesn’t work with Babes because Adlon isn’t able to balance the wildly different tones of either as well as someone like Apatow once did. As a result, her film often flip-flops from being one thing and then the other at a moment’s notice, with the inconsistency leaving you more frustrated than entertained.

Individually, there are aspects of the film’s differing personalities that do work, particularly when it isn’t indulging in all-out raunch. Babes is a much stronger product when it’s simply being a more grounded drama with occasional comedic moments, rather than the other way around, as you can sense that Adlon and writers Glazer and Rabinowitz are a lot more interested in tackling those aforementioned heavy themes that surprisingly few other pregnancy comedies tend to touch upon.

There are some interesting turns with Glazer and Buteau’s characters that signal how the very different lives they are leading, especially when it comes to caring for their young or yet-to-be-born children, are indicative of their somewhat immature personas, with Glazer’s Eden treating her developing infant like a new accessory at times, even going so far as to organise a prom-themed birthing plan like it’s her sweet sixteen birthday party. Meanwhile, Buteau’s Dawn is becoming increasingly weighed under the responsibilities of family life, which ultimately leads to her hijacking her bestie’s “baby-moon” spa trip as a means of escaping, a turn that shows a type of mother-centric selfishness that, again, you don’t often find in the likes of Knocked Up, Juno or other prominent pregnancy movies told predominantly from the mother’s perspective.

It is whenever Babes feels the need to fully embrace its outwardly comedic roots that the film succeeds far less. It isn’t that the performers themselves aren’t funny, as both Glazer and Buteau work very well together on the screen, but it’s more to do with how the type of humour it does present is a noticeable mismatch with the rest of the stuff that does work about the movie. An intimate conversation about breast pumps will suddenly devolve into a line-o-rama where the two characters just shout the word “bitch” at each other in different ways. An earlier pivotal scene sees them ingest mushrooms and one hallucinating breast milk squirting like geysers across the room while another pees straight onto the floor. It’s the kind of juvenile humour that you’d expect to see in a Farrelly Brothers movie from the 2000s, rather than the more humanist kind of film that Babes is otherwise trying to be.

Though it is frustrating, especially when you can see glimpses of the better movie being shown to you at the same time as the less appealing one, Babes does have enough interesting ideas in its head to barely carry itself to full-term.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Babes wants to be both a tender and thoughtful drama about modern motherhood, but also a raunchy and juvenile comedy, and both elements together end up forming a frustratingly uneven whole, although its tackling of surprisingly rare topics in pregnancy movies is admirable, even when the out-of-place humour isn’t.