BABES: 3 ½ STARS. “winning emotional honesty, humorous and heartfelt.”
LOGLINE: Happy-go-lucky New York yoga instructor Eden (Ilana Glazer) and dentist Dawn (Michelle Buteau) have been Inseparable BFFs since childhood. Their relationship is strained after Dawn gives birth to her second child, and Eden becomes pregnant after a one-night stand.
CAST: Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, John Carroll Lynch,Hasan Minhaj, Stephan James, Oliver Platt, Kenny and Keith Lucas, Sandra Bernhard. Directed by Pamela Adlon.
REVIEW: “Babes” sometimes feels like a sketch fleshed out to feature length, but the undeniable chemistry between Glazer and Buteau, the storytelling’s candor and big laughs justify the hour-and-fifty-minute runtime.
With the aid of Glazer and Buteau, director Pamela Adlon (star of TV’s “Better Things”) somehow mixes and matches gross-out humor with a compelling story of platonic romance, of child-rearing and family that may make you feel like tearing up and/or throwing up, sometimes in the same scene.
Glazer and Buteau—supported by strong work from John Carroll Lynch as a balding and plain-spoken pediatrician and Oliver Platt as Eden’s absent father—fit together like pieces of a puzzle. The Eden character borders on a stereotype of edgy New York behavior, which eats away at the film’s realism threshold, and the comedic back-and-forth between the two friends doesn’t always land.
But, despite those deficits, “Babes” has a winning emotional honesty that addresses the difficulties of major life changes and the expectations placed upon expecting women, in sometimes humorous, sometimes heartfelt ways.
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