Obvious Child is the best and funniest comedy about women’s reproductive options since Citizen Ruth, but that alone isn’t saying much. The subject of abortion is still largely a third rail in mainstream films, despite the pretense that Hollywood is a bastion of leftism. Even when they’re unplanned, movie pregnancies are usually taken to term and are viewed as gifts.
The A-word was nary a consideration in Knocked Up and Juno. The latter title has even been embraced as one of the 25 best “conservative movies” of the past quarter-century by National Review, which makes one wonder if its readers and editors are aware that it was written by a tattooed ex-stripper with a penchant for grindhouse films.
So it’s beyond refreshing to finally see a defiantly pro-choice film like Obvious Child, which is maybe the first movie to depict a young women who decides to abort her weeks-old fetus — the result of a one-night-stand — not because of health or economic reasons but because she isn’t in the right place to have a baby right now. It’s a sensible, empowered, mature decision, and in a year that has already seen such sanctimonious swill as a Gimme Shelter, it’s nothing short of a revelation.
Under the sensitive and witty writing and directing of first-time filmmaker Gillian Robespierre, SNL alum Jenny Slate plays, one would imagine, a version of herself at one time: a struggling, raunchy and very funny standup comedian in the “I can’t believe someone so cute talks like that” mold of Sarah Silverman. As her character, Donna Stern, succinctly describes herself in the standup bit that opens the movie, she’s like the result of “a menorah fucking Natalie Imbruglia.”
Her act, like this movie, is brutally honest, integrating her sex life into her material. Her boyfriend can’t, or won’t, handle it: He’s been sleeping around, anyway, and he dumps her after a show. Wallowing in self-pity, she gets trashed and lets Max (Jake Lacy), a sweet guy at the comedy club, take her home; shortly thereafter, after some swelling in her breasts, she pees on a plus sign.
Donna pursues an immediate abortion at her local Planned Parenthood, but apparently she’s too early in her term to be eligible for the procedure — one of a number of things the movie teaches us about the process. She has to wait two weeks, which, in a lesser movie, would be plenty of time for a Disneyfied and unrealistic change of heart.
But there is no sense of panic or moral righteousness in Obvious Child. This movie’s suspense lies not in the question “will she or won’t she” go through with the abortion, but how will she tell the man, if she tells him at all? Jake and Donna run into each other numerous times over the fortnight between doctor’s visits, some of them incidental and others planned, and it’s obvious Max is interested in pursuing a relationship with Donna. Her feelings are a little more complicated, and it doesn’t help that he seems to be so interested in, as he puts it over a meal at her favorite restaurant, “becoming a grandfather.”
A liberated women’s writer more attuned to Girls than Sex and the City, Robespierre’s commendably naturalistic screenplay understands the standup business as much as she understands relationships and young women. She, and her onscreen avatar, view comedy as performance art and as a therapeutic outlet for truth-telling, and it’s a beautiful thing. The inevitable onstage breakdown scene following her breakup, where the audience all but chucks tomatoes at her, is the movie’s lone cliché; everything else, from the minutest conversations to its grand design, skirts predictability every step of the way.
When Donna tells her mother, a literature professor, that she’s pregnant, mom’s reply is the best response to that statement I’ve ever seen. As for Slate, she’s perfect — a charming translator of filthy jokes whose performance reveals the difficulty of her decision: the tears buried beneath the false bravado of her comedic declarations on and offstage.
Donna clearly has a moral compass and a poignant character arc, but that hasn’t stopped conservative pundits like Brent Bozell from trashing the movie, even though he clearly hasn’t seen it (right-wing hysteria over progressive films is seldom accompanied by informed, first-person experience; the writers only parrot previously published material. See Rush Limbaugh’s proudly uninformed attack on 12 Years a Slave earlier this year).
If it’ll help bring more eyeballs to this remarkable movie, then I say, bring on the conservative tsunami. And if it helps to destigmatize a procedure as common yet maligned as an abortion in the eyes of young women, that’s even better. At the very least, it should make you laugh. A lot.
OBVIOUS CHILD. Director: Gillian Robespierre; Cast: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffman, Gabe Liedman, David Cross, Richard Kind, Polly Draper; Rating: R; Distributor: A24 Opens: June 20 at Regal Shadowood, AMC Aventura, AMC Sunset Place and Regal South Beach