‘Babes’ Review: Pamela Adlon Gives Birth to the Comedy of the Year | SXSW 2024
Growing older and maturing is a crucial part of the human experience, but doing it alone is the antithesis to life. Having a lifelong friend can be the cure to this particular ailment; a person familiar with the intricacies of knowing someone their entire life with all the baggage that comes with it. Pamela Adlon’s feature directorial debut, Babes, fully realizes that having this type of person around is a bond that can’t be understated while also tackling the issues of modest codependency after a lifetime of knowing someone. The connections forged in life might have the ability to break us, but it’s ultimately the understanding and love in these relationships that keeps us whole, offering a hope that can only be experienced with these bonds.
Eden (Broad City’s Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau, Survival of the Thickest) have known each other since childhood, having grown up in New York City together. Eden is a yoga instructor at her own studio, which happens to be her apartment, while Dawn is a successful dentist attempting to make a name for herself in the dentistry world. There’s an immediate, palpable honesty to the way the women speak to each other, a genuinely relaxed bond that’s indicative of the comfort one builds from being around another for so long. Their yearly Thanksgiving tradition of going to the cinema together is slightly derailed when Dawn goes into labor at the movie theater and quickly decides she must eat before they head to the nearest hospital. What ensues is one of the funniest opening scenes of the past few years as Eden tries to get Dawn to a hospital room, confusing the patrons of the high-end restaurant they’re dining in as she barely makes it out, screaming and almost crowning before literally crawling to a room once the two make it to the hospital. It’s immediately evident that Glazer and Buteau are comedy gold together, spinning together laughs from the opening scene to the final moments of the film.
After a full day at the hospital, Eden heads home on the subway, where she meets Claude (Stephan James) after he keeps the door open for her. The two strike up a conversation, realizing they have much in common. The reciprocation of empathy to the other’s thoughts and struggles provides every interaction and glance with warm affection, eventually igniting a late-night hookup. The two find solace in the others’ presence, indicative of two souls constantly searching for someone who will see them fully. A montage of Eden and Claude spending the night together, eating hundreds of dollars worth of sushi, and eventually having sex brings a lightness to the film that is only further accentuated by a soft composition playing over them spending time together. Moments of sincerity in the midst of belly laughter accentuate how steeped in reality the film is, how it’s able to confront the awkwardness of life that can come right after great moments, and why it’s a step above other comedies in the same wheelhouse that tackle friendship. While some comedies falter during more serious moments, Babes welcomes them with open arms and never shies away from the reality of sharing your life with others.
After a month of silence from Claude following sex, Eden discovers she’s pregnant, which is surprising to her after being convinced that sex on a menstrual cycle cannot result in pregnancy. While she’s confused as to why he hasn’t responded after their night together, she mostly can’t figure out why he hasn’t texted her back about the bow tie he left at her apartment. At the least, even if he didn’t have a good time, surely he would want his bow tie back, Eden’s sure of it! Isn’t it interesting how we, as humans, start creating scenarios and possibilities in the face of rejection? Eden clearly shies away from accepting situations that could cause her emotional distress like this by rationalizing for others. The relatability on display in this film could easily cause it to become the comfort rewatch of many, as the specificity of the story might revolve around the two women, but the universality of connections between people shines through to craft a story worth appreciating and revisiting when the hardships of life inflict doubt.
Even smaller moments that get brought up multiple times, like Eden’s inability to understand the science behind conception while menstruating, are hilarious in Glazer’s assured hands as she brings the same authenticity that brought her adoration from her Comedy Central series, Broad City. Thrusting herself into a quick investigation into being ignored by Claude, Eden discovers that a day after their meeting that he died in a freak accident. After the initial panic, Dawn assures Eden that she won’t have to worry during her pregnancy because her best friend will be there every step of the way. We go through life attempting to grasp the world around us, the people that populate it, but how often do we exert ourselves to consider the relationships we already have? The beauty of life resides in the intimacy we forge in our closest relationships, which is where Babes succeeds by allowing its audience to sit with the link between time spent together and the perception that only those hours or days spent together are what creates a strong bond. In reality, a connection can come in surprising places, even on the subway with someone you’ve never met.
Eden’s pregnancy journey is hysterical, complete with both a Beyoncé-inspired photo shoot shot by Dawn and a Shania Twain needle drop. Glazer co-wrote the script with Josh Rabinowitz (Broad City, The Carmichael Show), the two crafting a tale of contemporary friendship that follows belly laughs with moments of striking relatability. Eden’s pregnancy begins to put strife in Dawn’s marriage, with Hasan Minhaj playing a husband who loves his wife but questions the codependency she has with her best friend. She doesn’t even realize her effect on her best friend, completely obtuse to it by selfishly only looking inward for needs instead of reaching a friendly hand out to Dawn, who is clearly overwhelmed with the responsibilities of a family that has recently added another child. Michelle Buteau is marvelous at capturing the frustration of a working mother drained by everything in her day, who truly needs more than one vacation to decompress. There are moments of such sincerity in her performance that it almost feels criminal to not have seen her in a leading role in a major film. After an attempt by Eden to help Dawn’s oldest child mature after having a newborn sibling by hilariously showing him The Omen at four years old, things become rocky between the two after Dawn’s son becomes fleetingly obsessed with satanism and the occult, resulting in the loss of their religious nanny. Buteau shines in these moments, flexing her abilities past comedy as Dawn struggles with the constant nagging responsibilities of parenthood and work.
There’s a dissonance to Eden without Dawn’s presence, the tension of a fight with a best friend consuming her as she tries to continue her pregnancy journey mostly alone (with the help of a hilariously dry doula named Dragona). She speaks to her out-of-touch father (Oliver Platt), continues her appointments with a doctor mostly concerned with the appearance of his hair (who she also convinces to gag and blindfold her during her amniocentesis to keep her calm), and prepares for the upcoming birth of her child. Ilana Glazer reminds audiences why they loved Broad City, only further cementing herself as a crucial comedic voice. Being co-writer of the film provides Glazer with room to play with the character and push herself into a character that she helped create with lines of dialogue that could believably been tightly scripted or improvised during filming. With non-stop jokes flying at every turn, Babes offers something to audiences of all types, whether your preferred sense of humor is physical comedy like the aforementioned crawl to the hospital room during labor, deadpan deliveries of the wildest dialogue, or Glazer’s signature sarcasm.
The authenticity of the script meshes together perfectly with the sensibilities of the two leads, allowing them comfort in the usual comedy they both excel at while creating a space for them to venture towards more emotionally serious moments that they shine in. Some narratives don’t move fluidly through these tonal shifts, creating awkwardness in structure, but Pamela Adlon understands that these types of shifts occur naturally in relationships, which pushes the film to great heights with a grounded feeling of realism in the central friendship. There are glimpses into Eden’s disappointment at having the child without Claude around, the world they built together in one night having become an unlivable fantasy that Eden can only see in her mind. Intimacy goes hand-in-hand with empathy, the latter allowing the former to form the roads in this new world for the two to travel down toward a better appreciation of one another. While many films dissect friendships, Babes’ authentic depiction of watching these created worlds be shaken by misunderstandings and fear of loneliness is what sets it apart.
Babes showcases the irrelevance of time in connections by juxtaposing the relationships Eden has with her life-long best friend and a man she only knew for a night. Regardless of the time spent together, she felt closer to Claude, more understood by him than anyone else around her. Even in just one night spent together, he mirrors the weirdness within Eden and makes her feel an intimacy she hasn’t with another man. They’re able to see themselves in each other in their brief time together. Pamela Adlon directing the film only makes sense to those who are familiar with her FX series, Better Things, a showcase for an honest depiction of the lives of women. She follows laughs with poignancy, only to revert right back to humor, creating a relatable world where the tension of life as an adult can become unbearable as one tries to find their way in a society hellbent on disavowing empathy.
A laugh-a-minute film complete with two incredible lead performances from Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, Babes is the first great comedy of the year. Adlon’s assured guidance, coupled with an incredibly funny script that peppers in moments of poignancy surrounding the loss of connections and how we proceed after, is a winning combination. There’s a universality in the way humans worry how they’re perceived, an anxiety that can be qualmed by finally finding someone that sees you. It’s a perfect film to watch on a first date, after a break-up, with a best friend, even only surrounded by strangers or totally alone. There’s something to be taken from the film no matter who surrounds you in the audience, perhaps even leaving you with a hope of creating new connections or renewing old ones. Babes is a film that can easily be associated with just being a comedy with its high-volume hilarity, but the authentic depiction of friendships assures that the film is much more than that.
Grade: A
This review is from the 2024 SXSW Film Festival. NEON will release Babes only in theaters on May 17, 2024.
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