Farts, abortion, maybe love: Obvious Child
Writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s debut feature, Obvious Child, is a fleet, largely artless comedy with a charming but limited cast. But because its woman protagonist elects to have an abortion, the movie seems bound to generate conversation — conversation about the wrong stuff.
The procedure itself isn’t the point. Abortion, and the political and moral and socioeconomic specters that shadow it, is simply one event among several that happen to Obvious Child‘s main character while we eavesdrop on a few semi-crappy weeks in her life.
The character is Donna, a tartly self-critical but mostly confident Brooklynite ending her 20s in public, on the small comedy stage of a hipster bar. She’s played by Jenny Slate, who spent one distressed season on Saturday Night Live before becoming a reliable guest actor on shows such as Parks and Recreation (not to mention co-creating the brilliant Marcel the Shell With Shoes On shorts). Slate sculpts Donna out of giggles and cheerful profanities and a few tears — indefatigability conveyed in dirty-joke smiles. It’s less a performance than a sketch, yet its truth is in its lightness; Donna’s superficiality is a mask that you see in real life on a lot of smart faces.
As we meet Donna, that mask is getting hot. Her cheating boyfriend is about to end their relationship, and the indie bookstore where she works is about to close forever. So far, so quarter-life crisis. There are divorced parents, successful in their fields (Richard Kind and Polly Draper, deeper than they have to be in a couple of scenes apiece), so there’s the suggestion of a safety net. There is a lovably loudmouthed best girlfriend (Girls veteran Gaby Hoffmann, lending this enterprise a certain transitive property of millennial-generation casting). There is a droll gay bestie (Gabe Liedman, an Inside Amy Schumer writer).
There is also Max (Jake Lacy, rightly bland), unironic wearer of topsiders and giver of romantic gestures, who knocks up Donna in a sweetly haphazard one-night stand. Max stands in for red-state values without expressly signifying any, though we know he’s a progressive at heart because he extols Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. But his transparent portraiture holds truth, too, and Robespierre is working a time-honored notion: that what’s round sometimes badly needs what’s square. She even writes the maybe-couple a Billy Wilder-worthy last exchange.
Wilder’s The Apartment isn’t one of the classics named as a contrast in David Denby’s 2007 lament on the modern romantic comedy that was occasioned by the success of Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up that summer. Speaking of anniversaries, Denby despaired back then that cinema couples had become “the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow,” a sad devolution from golden Hollywood madcappery and screwballery. Seth Rogen, the man-child, farting, etc. Well, there are fart jokes in Obvious Child, too. And poop jokes. And a few words about not-so-fresh underwear. They’re funny — funnier than recent-issue Apatow, in fact — but they’re here for different reasons. For one, Robespierre’s characters are OK with their bodies, with what bodies do. Her comedy is one of manners more than of romance — the protocols of what friends and lovers (and parents and children) reveal about themselves and, yes, their bodies, and when and at what risk.
That emphasis on our unwritten rules of physical conduct is how Robespierre gets away with presenting Donna’s abortion as a matter of bodily fact. Though the choice isn’t made lightly, it is also not an excruciating dilemma. Donna recognizes herself as, in Denby’s word, the slacker in what he called the “slacker-striver comedies” of our age. Her unreadiness to be a mother isn’t a tragedy or a failing; it, too, is a fact, presented calmly and without judgment. That’s not revolutionary, but it’s a welcome inversion, with Max the quiet striver who sees a possible mate in a distaff version of the usual Apatow man-child. But Donna is, whatever her low-grade flaws, comfortable in her own skin, and that kind of ease — with the body, with the self — shouldn’t be so rare for women onscreen. Obvious Child reminds you just how infrequently we’re treated to it, though, and for that reason alone, it’s the first memorable comedy in a while.
