Babes

2024 | rated R | starring Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, Hasan Minhaj | directed by Pamela Adlon | 1h 44m | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |

After just watching her best friend, Dawn (Michelle Buteau) have her second child, Eden (Ilana Glazer) has a one-night stand and gets pregnant herself. While Eden always expected her best friend to be there for her, life pulls them apart and she has to navigate the changes in her body alone.

We’re back once again to support Ilana Glazer and her post-Broad City movie career. After her first film, the wacko pregnancy paranoia thriller False Positive, Babes goes to the other end of the spectrum, exploring pregnancy as a wild, but human, challenge wrapped around a best-friend comedy. BFFs aren’t the only thing that makes Babes feel like an improvised Judd Apatow comedy, but the movie searches for a voice while Glazer attempts to translate her own real life pregnancy experience to the screen for laughs.

A lot of what keeps Babes from working is the friendship at the center of it doesn’t quite feel right. Glazer and Buteau try their best to manufacture chemistry that can’t be faked. While Glazer valiantly tries to lift scenes up with a goofy delivery or reaction when the written punchline fizzles out, Eden also still feels like a real person. Buteau is deeply unfunny and Dawn, increasingly obnoxious. There is a critical scene about halfway through where a very pregnant Eden and stressed-out Dawn go for a spa day together. The revelation of Dawn’s feelings of superiority toward Eden for being married and having two kids is a shocker. It’s here where Glazer states the film’s thesis, essentially that growing up pulls apart friendships when it shouldn’t. Dawn doesn’t think that. She doesn’t need a lifelong friend in her life now that she has kids. It’s a strain of logic that not only shows Dawn to be a terrible friend, but as the speech comes out of nowhere, a bad person who it’s hard to imagine would be friends with Eden in the first place.

The movie, directed oddly enough by Pamela Adlon post her excellent FX dramedy Better Things, movie is deeply unfocused, floundering around trying to find a unique perspective on the often-told tale of impending motherhood. Yet, despite how bland most of it is, how few of the jokes land, there is a normalcy to it that I also appreciated. Babes stands out in a 2024 movie year that started out hellbent on making pregnancy and motherhood seem like an oppressive, alien act that the female body isn’t made for and that we as a species should not be procreating. From Immaculate to the admittedly well-made The First Omen to the alien pregnancy of Alien: Romulus to the appalling Amy Adams allegory Nightbitch. And that’s if the movie singles in on pregnancy and not just the overall Hollywood theme that simply being a woman in society is a daily unbearable horror show.

Yes, so in all that, the relatively pro-mother, pro-pregnancy Babes feels somewhat refreshing. Glazer does cartwheels trying to elevate the material, but nobody else here is on the same page. She doesn’t translate the pregnancy experience here as well as she does in her Hulu stand-up special Human Magic. This is a movie with more hands in the cookie jar than that show’s singular vision and a few different competing themes that all combine to make a pretty vanilla viewing experience. I’m still rooting for Illana to craft her unique perspective into a movie worthy of it. It’s coming.