“Babes” is, obviously, about pregnancy, which gives plenty of opportunity for body humor involving fluids and openings and other matters. But it’s just as much about friendship, and about the struggle to maintain connections when life circumstances change. It’s also about how frustrating young parenthood can be, even if you have the ability to pay for help and don’t worry about the roof over your head. In sum, you can almost hear the movie saying, adult life is a land of contrasts, and you’d better just hang on for the bumpy ride.
All of which is funny. Pregnancy is still relatively uncharted territory in mainstream comedy, probably because it’s hard to write jokes about it if you haven’t gone through it, and a sizable chunk of comedy writers hasn’t. Friendship is more commonly plumbed for comedic material, but “Babes” is somewhat rare for focusing mostly on the everyday bits of friendship — babysitting your friend’s kid, going to the movies, wanting to just drop by unannounced — that tend to play better in a hangout sitcom, with plenty of character development, than in a feature-length film. There are a bunch of funny gags, too, the best of which involves the ever-evolving hairstyles of Eden’s long-suffering obstetrician (John Carroll Lynch).
But there’s a looseness to the delivery and the rhythm of the performances that doesn’t match the ping-ponginess of the script. It’s less about any element being wrong on its own and more of a mismatch, at least in the scenes where Glazer and Buteau’s characters are meant to be riffing on a long, intimate friendship. Sometimes it feels like the jokes are funnier to the characters than to us, which leaves us feeling as though we’re being excluded. Nobody likes that.
Adlon’s style has always struck me as drawn out of the 1970s, a little meandering, some time to think and look at the screen, and that’s shown off to good effect in the film’s more contemplative scenes. But that same calmness means Eden, by contrast, starts to be grating. Glazer’s energy is generally chaotic, and I mean that in a good way — but stuck in the middle of this less chaotic film, she seems to embody the kind of woman who used to be quirky and cute in her 20s and is now just exhausting to be around. Eden knows she’s “a lot,” as she tells Dawn, but after a while you get the sneaking suspicion that she’s being cute on purpose, and it feels like compensating for something. Whatever it is, it starts to be hard to be around her.
