She’s preggers and we’re laughing
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 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 a 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.
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. 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, 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 nice guy (Jake Lacy), she goes through the angst that almost every woman has experienced at least once: That stomachturning 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 chicken when it comes to hot-button politics.
Obvious Child is such an anomaly, such a shaggy and brave black sheep, that it’s hard not to embrace.