2025 | rated R | starring Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges | written & directed by Eva Victor | 1 hr 43 mins | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |
{Contains Spoilers for I Used to Be Funny}
Anges (Eva Victor) is a literary professor at a small, but prestigious, New England university navigating life as her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie, Don’t Blink) seems to be growing up and moving on without her. We learn her rut is actually the result of a “very bad thing” that happened at the hands of a senior university professor.
If the plot of Sorry, Baby sounds a bit like last year’s Rachel Sennot vehicle I Used to Be Funny, that’s because it is very similar. I recall really liking I Used to Be Funny and a quick look back here showed that I gave it 3.5 stars. I may need to bump that up know that we have a counter-weight that reframes what that movie does so well in a new light.
In a quick reminder, Funny was about a young comedian who, told partially in flashback, had her career derailed by the trauma of being sexually assaulted by the father of the child she was baby sitting, who then has to work through that when the child goes missing and she sets off to find her. It balanced the drama and comedy well, has fairly realistic characters (if New York art stereotypes) and a story that’s meatier than just our lead wallowing in her trauma for the duration. Sorry, Baby is that basic story stripped to the bone. Following quirky characters who live in their own world and pretty much stay there for the duration. Anges is the socially awkward, likely autistic (though nobody is saying that) academic who writes well, which has given her a stepladder up the ranks in academia despite being barely able to move through the world without getting stabbed on its every sharp corner. Her best friend is Lydie and her opposite and – acting out the trope of every POC lesbian character in every BBC series – Lydia lives her true self and best life at all times, finding love and success fall in her lap for being awesome.
There’s a scene about halfway through the film where Anges and Lydia go to the doctor and we see how these two interact with someone from the real world. They are almost unable to even communicate because the doctor is there to do a job and they are there to be coddled with soft tones and comforting language. Sorry Baby feels like a grandchild of mumblecore films of the 2000’s, low budget movies with writer/director/stars about people who just graduated college, usually in New York City or New Jersey, now adrift with what to do with their life next. When these movies were stylish they were Garden State, when they were satirical springboards to TV shows they were Tiny Furniture, when they’re buddy comedies they’re Babes, when they were great they were Frances Ha. But Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach and particularly Lena Dunham’s Girls had a self-awareness of their characters. The joke was a little bit on them as well.
This new age of A24 female artists don’t seem to have that same self-awareness and the movies are all coming off one-note and the same. An indie trauma porn therapy session in which there is no way to self-improve because trauma and PTSD has shifted from something to over-come to something that is just part of your personality now. In prior movies, characters had a goal – a job, a love interest or achievement they were chasing – and they learned something even if they didn’t achieve it. They had agency and momentum. These characters sit around and wallow in misery until outside characters step in and re-direct them. They have no agency and no momentum. There isn’t so much an outside antagonist, now the problem is within. It’s about them overcoming themselves. As I mentioned in my review of I Used to Be Funny, Sorry, Baby suffers from the same gender dynamic agency issue: ie. a man in that situation would end up alone and committing suicide. A woman in this same headspace has no shortage of family, friends and love interests who are actively helping and encouraging them. In Baby, that love interest role goes to Lukas Hedges, an equally socially awkward (and possibly autistic) neighbor who Victor runs into while telling a lie and ends up sleeping with. She encounters John Carroll Lynch in a very good against-type cameo as a helpful sandwich shop owner. Whenever she is most down, someone is there to step in and help.
I got almost nothing out of this, probably because I’m not a woman, but I don’t know a lot of women who like to wallow in misery porn either. We’re supposed to think Sorry, Baby is important because it’s about sexual assault, which I reject completely. I reject this movie and the trend of movies like it; where characters are created as writer inserts designed to tell their story over stories written to explore the full human experience and enlighten us to people who aren’t us. I reject the idea that the only story Gen-Z women have to tell are tales of being sexually assaulted. Where is this coming from? Fanfiction culture, screenwriting classes, is it the only kind of story A24 will produce? Are women writing zany comedies about their quirky friends and A24 is going “no, rape trauma movies only”?
Sorry, Baby is the movie famous for its poster in which Victor cradles a small kitten. This of course prompted everybody on social media to leap to their computers and virtue signal that “have to know if the cat lives” – as if it’s some sort of trope that cats die in movies = because they would just fall into their own trauma hole if they were exposed to a cat dying on screen. Good news, the cat is barely in the movie and lives like most cats in movies (outside of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation). The baby of the title refers to, not a cat, but an actual human baby. Sorry, internet loons.