Directed by: Pamela Adlon.
Written by: Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz.
Starring: Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, and Hasan Minhaj.
Runtime: 104 minutes.
Ilana Glazer pushes the limits of best-friendship in raunchy pregnancy comedy ‘Babes’
“Adults don’t plan their lives around their best friends.”
Those words cut like in a knife in “Babes,” because anyone who’s had a best friend long enough knows there’s no relationship on earth more intimate. Forget spouses and lovers, parents and children, or the closest of siblings (even twins). You have not known true intimacy until you’ve had your best girlfriend look up your dress to check the liquid running down your leg, taken your Facetime in the shower, or helped you set a breast pump on fire to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” without batting a lash.
Best friends have seen you at your messiest and least dignified, and every day they choose to love you because they want to, not because they feel they have to.
On paper, few millennial women seemed as equipped to write and star in a film about modern adult female friendship like Ilana Glazer, co-creator of the acclaimed Comedy Central series “Broad City.” The friendship in “Babes” was almost certainly informed by Glazer’s own life; she and her “Broad City” creative partner Abbi Jacobson ended the series in 2019 and went their separate ways, Jacobson rebooting “A League of Their Own” as an Amazon series while Glazer had her first child.
In this unabashedly foul-mouthed, R-rated, effluvia-filled raunch-com, Glazer plays Eden opposite Michelle Buteau’s Dawn. They’ve been besties their whole adult lives and then some, so long that Dawn’s widening cervix and impending birth isn’t enough to break their 27-year tradition of seeing a movie together on Thanksgiving morning, Dawn’s husband and young children (and her rupturing amniotic sac) be damned.
But that bond, so long unbreakable, gets put to the stress test when driftless, untethered Eden – the unpartnered uber millennial with a soda machine in her apartment instead of a 401K – finds herself pregnant after an unintentional one-night stand and decides to embrace unexpected motherhood.
Glazer and Buteau are well-matched for comedic energy, physical and absolutely unembarrassed as they explore all the ugly, achy, gushing realities of womanhood onscreen. But the friendship that forms the heart of “Babes” feels adrift in a sea of bodily fluids and caterwauling. High on shrooms, Dawn has a conversation with her breasts while milk geysers out of her nipples and Eden urinates on the rug aiming for a pregnancy test. They women belch and barf. Old New York City sewage pipes burst and leave abstract paintings on the wall. Eden is sexually aroused by a pair of raw chicken cutlets. The list of indignities is long.
It’s intentional, of course, and can be as funny as it is sickening, if you go for that sort of thing. Glazer and co-writer Josh Rabinowitz (also a “Broad City” writer and producer), along with director Pamela Adlon (“Louie,” “Better Things”) in her feature film directorial debut, are making a point about the reality of women’s lives in all their often-filthy glory. Motherhood is a dirty business, and “Babes” doesn’t flinch from the details mommy influencers often elide.
But it makes for a fair bit of tonal whiplash, all those scatological gags and absurd swings distracting from heartfelt meditations on adult friendship. Eden’s one-night stand, a charming, tuxedoed gent on the subway who doesn’t balk at sex with Eden while she’s got her period, chokes to death the day after their dalliance on… an almond?
Maybe it’s all part of the messy journey of maturation, Eden’s and Glazer’s, this jamming together of mismatched puzzle pieces until they fit to make something like a life – or film.
Barbara’s ranking
2/4 stars
