Babes review – a true bun­dle of joy

The line between arrest­ed devel­op­ment and liv­ing your best life is a fine one. In Ilana Glazer’s penned Babes, it all but doesn’t exist, with char­ac­ters who are forced into adult roles despite still feel­ing like they are still chil­dren them­selves. Pamela Adlon’s fea­ture direc­to­r­i­al debut sees Eden (Glaz­er) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) both deal­ing with moth­er­hood and nav­i­gat­ing their intense friend­ship through a fem­i­nist lens that evokes the best of Nicole Holofcener.

Dawn is a den­tist with her life sup­pos­ed­ly togeth­er. She has a lov­ing hus­band, Mar­ty, (Hasan Min­haj) and a brand new sec­ond child, but below her nur­tur­ing sur­face, she is drown­ing under the pres­sure of being a woman who ​“has it all”. Her more free-spir­it­ed yoga instruc­tor best friend Eden is on a first-name basis with her local STI clin­ic employ­ees, but after an ill-fat­ed tryst with Claude (Stephan James) opts for sin­gle moth­er­hood. Despite Eden recog­nis­ing that Dawn is strug­gling to keep her many plates spin­ning, she still intends to rely on her friend to form the vil­lage that rais­es her child. Both char­ac­ters, despite out­ward­ly hav­ing very dif­fer­ent lives, are engaged in child­ish self-delu­sion and turn to each oth­er to sub­stan­ti­ate that they are both per­fect and mak­ing wise choices.

The film bal­ances nuanced por­tray­als of female code­pen­dence with slap­stick. Grief and exis­ten­tial dread punc­tu­ate scenes where a gen­tle trick­le of amni­ot­ic flu­id col­lects and a breast pump is a device of psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture. It sub­verts many of the major preg­nan­cy clich­es – there are no scream­ing rush­es to the hos­pi­tal after an explo­sive water break­ing – and instead there are the true hor­rors of colostrum, rasp­ber­ry leaf tea, and being told you might kill your baby if you lie on your back for a bit.

Adlon brings weight to her sub­ject but nev­er lets it get in the way of a good time, with a propen­si­ty for visu­al humour a gynaecologist’s hair trans­plant evolv­ing over 9 months nev­er gets old and is even fun­nier when jux­ta­posed with the sen­si­tive way he deliv­ers med­ical care to a ter­ri­fied Eden. Nee­dles casu­al­ly bran­dished by doc­tors resem­ble small spears and some­how even preg­nan­cy mas­sages are cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ments but the film is more inter­est­ed in the com­plex­i­ties of the dynam­ic between Dawn and Eden than pok­ing fun at preg­nant bellies.

When Eden laments that these new addi­tions that Dawn is pri­ori­tis­ing (aka her hus­band and chil­dren) over their estab­lished ​“fam­i­ly”, that betray­al is not histri­on­ic but speaks to a gen­uine sense of betray­al, where one half of a sin­cere pla­ton­ic love sto­ry has been cast aside in favour of het­ro­nor­ma­tiv­i­ty. Ludi­crous and imma­ture as that out­ward­ly seems, it’s heart­break­ing­ly hon­est and just one of the ways that Babes uses moth­er­hood as a way to explore how grow­ing up often feels like los­ing who you tru­ly are.

Buteau and Glaz­er bring a sub­tle wis­dom to the roles, which is only fur­ther illu­mi­nat­ed by Adlon’s musi­cal direc­tion that enhances both’s com­ic tim­ing. Even in the most crass jokes, where flu­id pours out of ori­fices, Babes is a delight­ful and pro­found study in growth.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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