The greatest comedy has always been uncompromisingly intimate and uncomfortable, taking a long hard look at life and its everyday tragedies and somehow helping us find laughter among the tears. Comedians like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Robin Williams were great because their comedy went to all the places that society was telling them it shouldn't go.
While "Obvious Child" doesn't pretend to reach for the levels of social criticism that those legends achieved, it does share that bohemian willingness to laugh in the face of taboo. "Obvious Child" is as honest, unadorned and quietly hopeful a romantic comedy about abortion as you'll likely ever see.
"Obvious Child" features Jenny Slate in an eye-opening turn as Donna Stern, a stand-up comic who loses her job, breaks up with her boyfriend and ends up getting pregnant after a one night stand with an earnest young business school student named Max, played by Jake Lacy. That Donna will get an abortion is never in doubt; the dramatic tension comes from her being forced to examine her life up until this point while dealing with the romantic intentions of Max, who is unaware she is pregnant.
Writer and director Gillian Robespierre, in her feature-film debut, does a masterful job of delivering a plausible and relatable story filled with wickedly funny gallows humor and characters that are refreshingly and humanly flawed. The film has a number of sweetly romantic moments that unexpectedly pop up like desert flowers amid all the angst and frustration of real life. Robespierre shows uncommon restraint in that the film offers no easy answers or prefabricated epiphany. Instead, it just tells its story in its own inimitably honest way.
"Obvious Child" is available on Blu-ray and DVD on Tuesday, October 7. Special features are the same for both and include:
- Audio commentary with Robespierre, Slate and producer / co-writer Elisabeth Holm - "The Making of 'Obvious Child' " featurette - Extended scenes - "Obvious Child" 2009 Short Film - Ultraviolet Digital HD Copy
The special features are decent if not extensive. The extended scenes serve more to show that the filmmakers made good decisions on what to cut out, as there is nothing in them that would have really added to the theatrical cut. The audio commentary, "making of" feature and the original 2009 short film are the winners here as they really show how much Slate, Robespierre and the story have grown over the last five years. Watching the short (essentially a decent-but-not-impressive student film) and then seeing the outstanding film it eventually became should serve as an inspiration for any aspiring filmmaker.
Film: 4 Yaps Extras: 3.5 Yaps
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2GN3wdfqbA?rel=0&w=514&h=289]