The exhilarating
feeling one gets when watching Obvious Child leads one to wonder why cinema so
rarely creates multi-faceted characters for women to play, only to realize that
roles this juicy don’t generally exist regardless of gender. Sexy and scared,
hilarious and vulnerable, Jenny Slate’s star-making performance as Donna Stern
is the engine that makes Obvious Child hum and is the driving force behind what
makes Gillian Robespierre’s adaptation of her 2009 short film so resonant when
compared to the paucity of substance offered by most romantic comedies. The
fact that it tackles needlessly controversial subjects matter-of-factly and
without apology is what makes it not just a great film, but also an important
one.
The story behind
Obvious Child is pretty basic. Struggling stand-up comedian, Donna Stern, finds
herself dumped, fired and pregnant from a one-night stand in short order. Still
unable to consistently take care of herself, let alone another human being, she
decides to have an abortion. The film has been able to parlay this status as
“the abortion rom-com” to pretty positive effect, but that shorthand does the
movie a disservice. While consistently hilarious, the movie is never glib in
dealing with Donna’s decision. This is an option that early cinema treated as
ruinous (always ending in shame or death) and recent movies have only given
coded lip service (Knocked Up) or disingenuous ‘equal treatment’ (Juno) toward,
so the fact that the film does no hand-wringing when it comes to the decision
itself is vitally important. Donna’s life may be in a state of perpetual
upheaval, but her decision remains constant throughout. It feels like a seismic
shift in the portrayal of women and their ability to choose on the big screen.
But set any
‘hot-button’ discussion of the movie aside, it’s just a great romantic comedy.
Slate has been given a gift with this role, a character perfectly calibrated
toward her ability to play the scatological while allowing audiences to see
just how capable she is of managing the more emotionally-driven moments the
film has to offer. It helps that both the character and actress are surrounded
by such a supportive cast of characters, with strong work from Gaby Hoffman,
Richard Kind and Polly Draper as the roommate and parents who help guide her
through such a tumultuous time. Jake Lacy’s Max deserves special recognition
though, taking the role most often left for women in American comedy (the
square counterpart to the crass lead) and finding the heart in such a
character. He leaves no doubt as to how easy it is to fall for Donna and her
unflinching honesty on stage and in life and makes his character’s innate
goodness feel unique instead of bland.
If the film was just the first seventy-odd minutes,
I’d still be recommending it heartily to you, but it’s in the film’s final
moments that it becomes unmissable. The film builds to these final moments
throughout and Robespierre and Slate bring it in for a flawless landing, with a
series of scenes that are heartfelt, heartbreaking and heart-filled before
culminating with an ending richly deserved for these wonderful characters.
Obvious Child is as uncompromising as the lead character it depicts, and this
viewpoint that allows for a female character to have agency over her own body
and life, making mistakes without punishment, is the kind of
narrative we need to see propagate our cinema and culture.
