DAN WEBSTER:
Friendship has been a common movie theme since the French filmmaker Georges Méliès first illuminated images on his 19th century movie screens.
Some of the greatest films ever made, in fact, from Casablanca to Some Like It Hot—not to mention more contemporary, popular films such as Stand By Me and the Bad Boys franchise—build whole storylines around the notion of friendship—relationships that express a kind of affection that most of us have experienced at least once, maybe a couple of times, in our lives.
Babes, a film directed by Pamela Adlon, is a perfect example of 21st century friendship. Based on an original screenplay co-written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, the film stars Glazer and Michell Buteau as BFFs since they both were 11 years old.
Glazer is Eden, a yoga teacher and determinedly single. Buteau is Dawn, a married woman and mother of a 4-year-old boy. Off from her job as a dentist, the very pregnant Dawn joins Eden in their annual Thanksgiving rite: to see a movie. Their evening gets disrupted, though, when Dawn goes into labor, and pretty soon the scene shifts to a hospital where the two are joined by Dawn’s husband, Marty (played by Hasan Minhaj), and a gaggle of hospital personnel.
Left on her own—with $500 worth of sushi that she’d purchased for Dawn but, for hospital protocol reasons, was unable to deliver—Eden finds herself on the first of four trains that she needs to take to get home. And it is there, while scarfing down her sushi, that she meets Claude (played by Stephan James) and the two connect—over sushi, over shared views on movies and, predictably, over that essential spark that signals mutual attraction.
The next thing you know they’re in bed, engaging in unprotected sex—a first time for both—because this being Eden’s—the popular euphemism is “time of the month”—she’s convinced that she can’t get pregnant.
Right. Next thing you know it’s a month later and a high Eden has gone through 20-some pregnancy tests, all of which come back positive. Her life, clearly, is about to change.
And that, of course, signals a change in her relationship with Dawn. Because just as she, once she decides to keep the baby, is going through the initial stages of this massive life change that is coming, Dawn is facing the trials of a second child, little sleep, the challenge around finding (and keeping a nanny) and the specter of post-partum depression.
So, along with Eden’s being alone in her pregnancy (a plot twist explains the absence of Claude), she starts to face the prospect of Dawn’s growing attempts to distance herself from what has been their long sense of being each other’s “family.”
At this point, Babes sounds like your standard melodrama, something that would play on the Hallmark Channel. But true to the talents of both Glazer and Buteau, the film coasts along—for the most part—on its sense of humor. Both Eden and Dawn are fast-talking, snarky New Yorkers (this is a quintessential New York story). And before the serious emotional stuff emerges, the film gives us plenty of opportunities to laugh.
Of course, you’d expect that, given what both Glazer and Buteau have done previously. Glazer is a stand-up comic who, along with having won a Tony Award for having produced the Broadway musical A Strange Loop, starred in the Comedy Central series Broad City.
Buteau, also a stand-up comic, has appeared in such movies as Isn’t It Romantic and Always Be My Maybe, performed in her award-winning comedy special Michelle Buteau: Welcome to Buteaupia and is host of the Late Night Whatever podcast.
The comic timing of both, blended with an authentic sense of how the demands of life can threaten even the closest of relationships, is what makes Babes an entertaining—and affecting—film to watch.
If you go, take a close friend. It may give you a lot to discuss—together.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is a senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com/7blog.