Babes
Ilana Glazer's raunchy and wickedly funny look at motherhood through the eyes of two girlbosses also manages to be a surprisingly authentic picture of friendship.
I figured I had “Babes” pegged pretty early on.
There’s been a spate of recent comedies focusing on the friendship between two or three strong-willed women with oodles of attitude — girlboss is the currently favored term. These movies also usually feature a lot of raunchy behavior, somewhat copying the longstanding tradition of dudes doing disgusting things onscreen for laughs.
“Babes,” starring Ilana Glazer, who also co-wrote (with Josh Rabinowitz) and produced, would seem at first glance to be along these lines, with the setting switched from young party girls to women settling down and having children. The title refers not to hottie singletons but the progeny they produce as they get a bit older.
But in addition to being wickedly funny — I laughed harder at this than just about any other movie I’ve seen in the last couple of years — it’s also a surprisingly authentic picture of female friendship, especially the trials in holding it together when parenthood sets in.
Glazer (“Broad City”) plays Eden, smart, spunky and happily single in (I’m guessing) her late 30s. She lives in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria and runs her own yoga studio. Eden’s primary relationship is with Dawn (Michelle Buteau), her best friend since childhood. The story opens with them upholding their tradition of watching a movie every Thanksgiving.
Dawn, a dentist, has been married for a few years to Marty (Hasan Minhaj), an agreeably unassertive type who seems to be the ideal partner for these sort of women: looks good, makes bank, and knows when to shut up and recede into the background, which is pretty much all the time.
They have a 3-year-old and Dawn is pregnant with their second kid, who decides to arrive at the usual cinematically inconvenient time. We’ve seen this scene of the chaotic birth many times: frantic rush to the ER, mom-to-be screaming in pain, other people in the room freaking out with equal fervor, and culminating in an adorable baby.
In this case, the kid arrives already swaddled in some, uh, brown byproduct of mom’s delivery. It’s a thing that happens, people.
After the celebration, Eden runs into a super-cute dude on the subway, Claude (Stephan James), they wind up talking the whole night, which turns into some other stuff, which turns into Eden getting pregnant herself. Claude winds up checking out of the picture, but Eden decides to move ahead with the single mommy thing.
Maybe she thinks it’s her last shot, or maybe she thinks it will further bond her with Dawn.
But Dawn’s going through her own stuff — postpartum depression hits hard. She dreads going back to work. Her older child recedes into baby behavior with diapers and pacifiers. She and Marty stop having sex. Their nannies keep quitting, due in part to Eden secretly showing their son “The Omen,” and he decides to start modeling 666 behavior.
Eden arrives regularly on their doorstep like a ball of anxious energy, wanting more and more from their sisterly bond, but Dawn finds she doesn’t have any nourishment to spare, emotionally or physically. (Lack of breast milk production is another challenge.)
“I just feel like I have it all… and nothing at once,” Dawn moans.
Trying to patch their rift, they decide to go on a “Babymoon” together. That’s where people about to have a baby go on a sort of honeymoon, since they won’t be able to travel again for awhile. Usually it’s the parents who do this, and despite the positive energy of its launch, the event only seems to harden the wall between them.
“Babes” boasts a terrific supporting cast, to the point I wanted these players to stick around long than they do. Oliver Pratt has one really good scene as Eden’s dad, a nervous wreck who stepped out long ago but not out of malevolence. John Carroll Lynch plays the doctor of both Eden and Dawn, good-naturedly taking their comedic abuse while lamenting his own hair-centered challenges. Sandra Bernhard (remember her!) turns up for a couple fun scenes as Dawn’s fellow dentist. The Lucas Brothers have a ripping funny scene as twins running a STD testing shop.
There’s a lot of brutally honest riffs on the realities of pregnancy and early motherhood — strange secretions, nipple changes, crazy appetite or none, etc. Glazer and Buteau play it for bawdy laughs, but with a wink and hug for those who have been through it themselves.
“Babes” is directed by Pamela Adlon, best known as an actress on the “Louie” show, who went on to headline her own comedy series, “Better Things,” and makes her debut as a feature film director after some TV and shorts work. The movie has great pacing and tone, the two things hardest for new directors — even veteran ones — to get right.
The laughs arrive in rolling waves that knock you over, and then just when you need to catch your breath, the movie shifts into emotionally heavy stuff that wouldn’t seem to fit with the comedy, but just does. “Babes” is very funny, very crude and very real.