The films, shows and articles about poor, hipster, 20-something millennials from New York have told their stories by subverting the tropes of the genres to which they belong. You can’t make a romantic comedy unless you make one “ironically”.
Gillian Robespierre may have cracked that nut with her film “Obvious Child”, a story of a poor, hipster, 20-something millennial from New York trying to figure out what to do with her life, until she gets pregnant and is forced to grow up just a little bit.
“Obvious Child” takes the attributes of the coolest rom-coms and the most popular, trashy ones and combines them in a way that’s earnest, funny, heartfelt and real. It supplements the ambitious and quirky blonde working girl with the slacker and potty-mouthed brunette and doesn’t miss a beat. Instead of wackily falling into fountains and poorly choosing work over true love, “Obvious Child’s” lead is her own sort of fuck-up, basket case, choosing less awkward moments and blunt honesty as a way of teetering on good decisions and bad. The film even plucks a best friend and token gay friend from Brooklyn to fill in the rest of the genre’s blanks.
But it best of all has a charismatic and likeable lead in Jenny Slate. Slate plays Donna Stern, a foul-mouthed comedian making confessionals about her life and boyfriend on stage. Immediately after a performance, her long time boyfriend dumps her badly, and she resorts to a very familiar form of drunk dialing, drinking a whole bottle of wine and singing to angry girl music.
Slate has a wonderfully whiny charm about her that’s funny and pathetic, but also endearing. We saw it in caricature glimpses in a stint on “Parks and Recreation”, but here she nails the train wreck routine while still maintaining her dirty, biting wit and likability. It must be something about how she wears a pout, a knit white hat, a turtleneck and a frumpy purple shawl that shows she’s in pain.
Things change when she meets a cute, but hapless looking guy named Max (Jake Lacy). He looks like a fish out of water when she convinces him to piss outside and when he explains his job, so even when she’s drunk, he’s putty in her hands. They have sex, and she leaves the next morning with nary a care. Inevitably, she winds up pregnant, determined to get an abortion and mostly struggling with how to break the news to Max.
“Obvious Child” avoids the politics of abortions and is more concerned with the nature of Donna’s commitment and maturity. She regularly does stand-up and has a healthy relationship with her best friend (a great Gaby Hoffmann, who looks enough like Slate to be Donna’s sister) and her father (Richard Kind). But then Max finds her sitting in a box in a bookstore and quoting one of her drunk lines, “You said you could mouth fuck the shit out of a burrito”.
At the very least, Robespierre’s screenplay is filled with enough one-liners and irreverent humor, like a cutaway, cartoonish scene about how Donna remembers her one-night stand, that “Obvious Child” molds smoothly to the rom-com conventions. It even ends in a clever mix of a funny and dramatic climax that isn’t a set piece.
“Obvious Child” lacks the crafty minimalism of a film like last year’s “Drinking Buddies” or the outrageous writing and family dynamics of the pinnacle pregnancy movie, “Juno,” but its most daring innovation is in finding a way to get its characters to play by the genre’s rules.
3 stars
One of my favorites of the year because even though it’s a small movie, it still has huge emotions that come directly out of its large heart and soul. Wish there were more indies like this. Good review.