The tone of "Babes" in many ways parallels the personality of its director, Pamela Adlon: smart, profane, irreverent and insightful.
Eden (Ilana Glazer - "Broad City") and Dawn (Michelle Buteau - "Isn't It Romantic," "Survival of the Thickest") have been best friends since they were eleven. They have a variety of rituals that bind their friendship together, including going to a movie every Thanksgiving. Eden is a single yoga instructor. Dawn is a dentist with aspirations of becoming the next spokesperson for Invisalign™. After a meet-cute with Claude, an aspiring actor who has two lines of dialogue in a Martin Scorsese movie, Eden discovers she is pregnant. The twenty-nine pregnancy tests weren't wrong. Turns out, Eden can be a little obsessive. When she decides to keep the baby, Eden expects Dawn to become her one-person support system, even though Dawn's married and has two young kids of her own, including a newborn.
"Babes" is the feature film debut for Director Adlon (acting roles in "Better Things," "Californication," 2018 Emmy nomination for voicing Bobby Hill on "King of the Hill"). She has the self-confidence to let Glazer and Buteau fully inhabit their roles. This hands-off approach offers several benefits as the story unfolds. The result is a film that avoids easy categorization. While it navigates some of the tropes of a romantic comedy and avoids the worst instincts of the genre, the central action is the deep platonic friendship of two women who have been through everything together.
It's ironic that as Co-Writer of this film, Glazer creates the more appealing role for her counterpart. Buteau's Dawn is a consistently appealing character who's also given the opportunity to show her skills at some very funny bits of physical comedy. Eden, on the other hand, is a curious mixture of sassy independence, self-absorption, vulnerability and neediness that never really worked for me.
Full disclosure: this is a film I may not be properly qualified to review. I'm male and I've never had kids. From my perspective, some of the dialogue and content seemed simultaneously smart, skillful and sophomoric. The multiple references to breast pumps were simply mystifying. And while I'm familiar with solids, liquids and gases on the periodic table, I was previously unaware that all three could be expelled - violently and regularly, apparently - from the female body during pregnancy. You live, you learn.
What blindsided me was the catch in my throat and some unusual moisture around my eyes as this film moved to a fairly predictable conclusion. It surprised me to feel so deeply at the end of a film where I never felt fully engaged. Your experience may vary.