Obvious Child
Tone a bit over-earnest, but bravery worth applauding
Obvious Child ★★★1/2
Starring: Jenny Slate, Gaby Hoffman, Jake Lacy, Richard Kind, Polly Draper Directed by: Gillian Robespierre Running time: 84 minutes
It’s as if the standard romantic comedy got Knocked Up in Portlandia, which is both the best thing and the worst thing about Obvious Child, Gillian Robespierre’s daring little feature about a standup comic who discovers she is pregnant.
On the upside, Obvious Child is offbeat and honest about the realities of human bonding. On the downside, Robespierre’s indie feature that kicked up media dust this week with Planned Parenthood for its discussion of abortion also has an indigenous pantsuit vibe, that self-conscious correctness of lesbian bookstores that makes you feel small beneath a mono-brow stare.
Robespierre is mocking all of it with a gentle nudge, but there’s no doubt Obvious Child feels a little precocious as it strolls down the back alley of women’s issues with the story of Donna Stern (Jenny Slate).
A standup comic living in oh-so-boho Brooklyn, Donna is your off-the-rack New York neurotic. She spends her days working in the failing bookstore that sells un-oppressive books, and she spends her nights either making others laugh it up at the club with her saucy mixture of NYC neurosis and PMS-fuelled barbs, or else crying into her pillow.
You see, Donna just got dumped.
The relationship hits the skids in the opening frames as her boyfriend tells her it’s over while gazing into his iPhone. From this point on, Donna begins an entertaining bus ride to Crazytown that includes everything from overdrinking and oversharing to standup self-immolation.
Women will recognize the debris field littered with regret and empty Ben & Jerry’s tubs, but watching a woman fall apart for more than 30 minutes is enough to make anyone look for the exit sign.
For some reason, it’s harder watching women decompensate. Men just get violent. But women really wallow in the misery. It’s like watching someone waterboard themselves with litre after litre of low self-esteem.
Fortunately, Slate is fun to watch in the lead role.
Even when she’s greas- ing the pan for her cute and spunky cupcake of a performance, she nails enough of the natural beats to make us like her, which turns out to be hugely important because Donna Stern goes where most screen heroines are forbidden to tread: the abortion clinic.
When Donna has a onenight stand with a really nice guy (Jake Lacy) who is her rom-com opposite, she goes through the angst that almost every woman out there has experienced at least once in her life: That stomach-turning moment of awareness that you really could be pregnant and your life really could change forever.
This is a universal reality for women, but we hardly ever see it played out on screen because narrative filmmakers are typically chicken when it comes to hot-button politics. They’re forced to think about audience and box office and return on investment, while the real issues that affect women are considered alienating, or activist or — God forbid — feminist.
It’s no wonder romantic comedies are hallucinatory exercises in status quo thinking, where everyone walks down the aisle in a tropical paradise by the end of the reel. If we actually talked about real relationships and the consequences of carnal knowledge, it would be a lot harder to generate product placement revenue and corporate studio support.
Obvious Child is such an anomaly, such a shaggy and brave black sheep, that it’s hard not to embrace — especially when it’s got puffy red eyes and mucous all over its face chanting “love sucks.”