Obvious Child

Writer/director Gillian Robespierre’s first feature, Obvious Child, is a movie I really wanted to like. I’m a fan of its star, stand-up comedian Jenny Slate, and I thought going in that it would be a romantic comedy made by people who actually enjoy that genre. Unfortunately, Obvious Child is one of those films that can only be partially admired for what it sets out to do but not fully embraced for its ability to provide insight through an engaging narrative. The story centers on Slate’s character Donna Stern, a burgeoning Brooklyn-based stand-up who gets pregnant after a drunken one-night stand. The question of whether or not to have an abortion is barely considered. Instead, Donna’s conundrums revolve around her unplanned condition. Does she tell the father that she’s having an abortion? If so, when should that happen? How awkward might that information make their potential second date? And how will this turn of events affect her relationship with her high-achieving mother? 

The refreshing decision to portray the problem of unwanted pregnancy as just another in a series of life’s struggles, rather than a life-defining crisis, differentiates this picture from the unrealistic, melodramatic, or sanctimonious ways this scenario typically plays out in Hollywood movies. Obvious Child is clearly meant as a counter-narrative to films like Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or Diablo Cody’s Juno (both released in 2007). Unfortunately, Obvious Child is as thematically self-conscious and devoid of a genuinely perceptive comedic edge as either of those subpar pictures. The movie doesn’t satisfy as a romcom, since the love interest (Jake Lacy) is a bland dud, and the best friend (Gaby Hoffmann) is almost as much of an insufferable subtext explainer as Rosie O'Donnell is in the unfathomably overrated genre standard-bearer Sleepless in Seattle.

Obvious Child is also reminiscent of Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me (2012), another uninspiring story about a twenty-something stand-up comedian learning basic lessons about life and love, and slowly (much too slowly) making the transition into adulthood. Robespierre’s film is better than Birbiglia’s, mainly because she uses Slate’s stand-up act to tell us about her character—a device that was certainly available to Birbiglia though he opted to directly address the camera and flatly explain his movie to us. But both films seem to buy into the unfortunate contemporary convention that if characters are prodigiously self-deprecating and acutely aware of their flaws, audiences will find them more relatable and accept them more as “real people.” To me, though, they seem every bit as contrived as characters from the more traditional romantic movies this film clearly thinks it’s above. 

Slate is a comedian I’ve enjoyed since I first saw her stand-up act years ago, and, like many others, I lamented her premature removal from Saturday Night Live where she accidentally said the F-word on her first live broadcast back in 2009. However, I was not prepared for what it would be like to follow her through an entire feature-length film. She speaks in that whiny, grown-woman-baby-talk voice that Lake Bell mocked so succinctly in her 2013 film In A World. Of course, part of the point of Obvious Child is that Donna is not yet a grown-up and therefore not fully capable of becoming a mother at this point in her life. However, she’s also incapable of carrying a feature-length narrative. Slate’s Brooklyn hipster who doesn’t want her twenties to end is no more intriguing a character than Seth Rogan’s lazy, stoner man-child in Knocked Up or Ellen Page’s absurdly wise-beyond-her-years teenager in Juno. I knew it was a bad sign when halfway through this film I realized I was relating much more to the disappointed mother (Polly Draper) than I was to Slate’s character. I wanted to tell this movie, “You could be doing so much more with your life.” Obvious Child is clearly meant to be a modest but significant shot across the bow in the culture wars, but I can’t judge a film by its intentions. If a story is underdeveloped, its themes and politics become irrelevant.