The Daily Telegraph - Features
The best US comedy since Bridesmaids
Film
Babes
15 cert, 104 min
★★★★★
Dir Pamela Adlon
Starring Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, Stephan James, John Carroll Lynch, Oliver Platt, Hasan Minhaj
At last, a good comedy: it’s been a famine out there. High concepts, high budgets and A-list stars have not yielded much joy lately, but right from the start of Babes, none of those things matter. You needn’t have the faintest idea who Ilana Glazer or Michelle Buteau are. It’s enough that this pair of US comics spark and connect, hilariously, as two lifelong friends who complete each other’s sentences.
The concept is a breeze: friendship + unexpected pregnancy = ?. Where Knocked Up considered how a one-night stand might be redeemed and a baby made, this knocks the man out of the equation.
Eden (Glazer, who co-wrote the script) assumes she’s been ghosted by Claude (Stephan James), a sweet actor she meets on the subway on the same long night when married, settled Dawn (Buteau) has just had her second child. In fact, Claude dies soon afterwards, having choked on an almond, alone. Their one night together has got Eden pregnant.
Eden decides she’s going to keep the baby, presuming she’s going to lean on her bestie throughout. But said bestie is going through the special hell of baby number two, while managing an older boy who has regressed, out of clinginess, to wearing nappies all over again.
How might hidden boundaries imperil a friendship? Bridesmaids asked the question from another angle. Babes approaches that film’s level of snap and poignancy – while pushing further into the gross-out zone, as you might expect from a film whose leads have less than no filter about the indignities of labour.
Fiercely talented as she is, Glazer can be relentlessly “on” with her comic timing. It’s almost a relief when Eden gets the door shut in her face, allowing her performance to gain depth. Honourable mentions go to Oliver Platt as Eden’s screwed-up father, and John Carroll Lynch as a gynaecologist unable to embrace his hair loss.
It’s Buteau, though, who gives the film’s standout turn. She’s screamingly funny at the start, making cow noises while her waters break in a chi-chi restaurant. But watching Dawn try to juggle the many demands of other people, stay compassionate, and not simply burn herself out, we’re glued because she’s so detailed at fatigue.
Debuting director Pamela Adlon pulls off an ending that’s touchingly well-judged, too – without being ridiculously utopian, it makes sense for everybody. And that’s even before we’ve spotted Whoopi Goldberg in the end credits, in the unguessed role of “Dawn’s Breasts”.
In cinemas now