PREGGOLAND
Fake-pregnant, and suddenly all her flaws are forgiven
Even as hot messes go, Ruth (Sonja Bennett) is in a class of her own. At the baby shower that opens Preggoland, she breaks the ice by offering everyone a little hair of the dog, gifts a large floppy dildo that prompts all the children in attendance to chant “penis” and wraps it all up by drunkenly missing a piñata and busting a kid’s nose. Actually, given how much hard liquor she swills, “semi-functioning alcoholic” might be more accurate, but this isn’t a movie capable of going to those kind of places, so “hot mess” it is.
Forcibly deviating the septum of one of their beloved brood proves to finally be a step too far for Ruth’s settled-down friends, so they turn their passive-aggression into pure aggression and ask her not to come around anymore. This inspires Ruth to buy a top-end stroller as penance, but seeing how she’s treated when lugging it around — for instance, the sales clerk mistakes her regular old hangover puke for the more adorable morning sickness kind — inspires a more direct line to redemption: with a little extra padding, she’s fake-pregnant, and suddenly all her flaws are forgiven.
There’s a wonderfully black heart pulsing somewhere be- hind this idea, exasperated at the weird double standard that exists in a society that sort of celebrates a woman’s choice, but really celebrates it when they get down to the traditional business of making babies. Bennett, who also wrote the script, goes digging for this in the conversations between Ruth and her friends, and finds nice moments of thinly veiled judgment and buried recrimination: one mother breaks down the evidently orgasmic pleasures of drug-free child birth — and this is after rejecting the high-end stroller because of its poor handling on three-point turns.
Bennett understands that the mix of moral authority and fierce protectiveness that comes with raising a kid is a ripe ground of hypocrisy (why hello there, anti-vaxxers) — nearly as rich as the wide gulf of social approval that separates a single, childless 30-something woman from one that has a bun in the oven.
What Bennett doesn’t do, though, is attack it; she’s not trying to land punches so much as lightly wave it all away. Much of the satire is drained out, practically and formally, by a turn toward the rom-com (the miscarriage plot, as it were), when Ruth starts noticing the gooey centre in her new, tight-ass boss. They bond a bit over the unique expectations of dating in your 30s, but for the most part it’s thin and standard fare, the pregnancy and its faking just one of those wacky circumstances that is always getting in the way of love. Besides that, it also pads out the running time of a comedy that already has a bit of a hitch in its step, never quite quick enough to get its jokes to land with maximum efficiency (although, in director Jacob Tierney’s favour, he makes Vancouver look like a dreary but dreamy place to be mostly alone in your 30s).
There’s still a bit of fighting spirit in here, and there are some moments with bite, particularly when Ruth goes looking for a surrogate, and a great gross-out scene involving a Jell-O belly and what looks like the elevators from The Shining opening from her uterus. These are pretty thinly spread once the movie stops caring about babies and starts worrying about men, though; Preggoland may start off a little messed up, but that fake baby is only ever about giving Ruth an excuse to grow into the good little member of society everyone wants her to be anyway.