54388: Babes
The end of Stand By Me turns a coming of age story into a tragedy, as Gordie reveals that he and his friends all drifted apart, finally saying, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” That line always kicks me in the heart and makes me wistful for my middle school days with the goofy, goofy bastards I called my best friends. Whenever I think about that movie, I wish that I could go back in time and tell twelve-year-old me to hang onto those friendships, no matter what. Hanging onto friendship, no matter what, is at the heart of Babes, the feature debut from Pamela Adlon. In a larger sense, the movie is about just hanging on at all. The script, by star Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, starts with a rom-com chassis and swaps out the thundering pistons of “will they/won’t they” romantic love for the much more sensible electric engine of “how do you keep a best friendship together as people grow and change?”
The story focuses on two ladies who grew up together in Astoria, Queens, and have remained best friends throughout their lives. One moved off to the Upper West Side to be a dentist and raise kids with her husband together in a brownstone, the other stays single and free-spirited, teaching yoga from her home studio back in Astoria. All is, seemingly, well between them in their decades-long friendship. However, cracks finally appear once the free spirit finds herself pregnant after a one night stand, and decides to keep the baby.
As a cis-gendered white man in his forties, I found this movie easily relatable and accessible.
Despite my loyalty to my Gen-X upbringing, the above statement is 100% free of irony. This movie got me immediately, from the very first scene and the meeting between Glazer’s Eden and co-star Michelle Buteau’s Dawn. Their friendship is beautiful, ridiculous, and life-affirming, and Adlon’s sly direction pulls the audience into Dawn and Eden’s dynamic so quickly and deeply that we’re immediately invested in this friendship and its survival. We want them to pull through the many challenges they’ll face (self-created and otherwise) on their journey to a deeper and stronger love for each other.
Despite all the learning and moving and whatever, Babes is a comedy. The humor is at times raunchy, (particularly the scatalogical riffs on the fluids and solids involved in childbirth), ribald, and referential. I may be one of the few people in my age cohort to not have seen Broad City, so I’m not sure if this is a typical Glazer joint or not, but it worked for me. I even saw this movie in an empty auditorium, which is not the ideal way to experience a comedy, and the jokes landed.
In between the jokes, Babes also hands out a few gut punches. Taken altogether, it feels quite different from the comedies I grew up with. Babes doesn’t deal in big wacky set pieces like a Farrelly brothers movie, or the biting social satire of a Paddy Chayefsky script. It feels more real than that, mixing the insanity of life with the banality of living.
The relationship at the heart of Babes is driven in part by New York City, the ever-present third wheel in Dawn and Eden’s friendship. The city creates emotional and logistical distance between them through trains and transfers, it creates problems through walkups and ancient plumbing mishaps, the whole time silently pushing and pulling our protagonists through their lives. I’ll admit to a bit of nostalgia, seeing the big city on the screen through the eyes of a director who has an obvious affection for it, and from enough of a distance that the rough edges look homey. Adlon does a wonderful job of capturing the city’s beauty and its flaws in a flattering light, just as she does for Dawn and Eden.
Over the course of a very eventful year, Adlon chronicles their ups and downs, showing the ways they depend on each other as well as the times they leave each other high and dry. Each faces her own existential crisis, and struggles to find the emotional wherewithal to help the other. Eden, naturally, sees her entire world changing and struggles to adapt to new situations, such as trying to lead a yoga class while managing morning sickness, or managing her fancy new hormones. Dawn, meanwhile, is beaten down by life with two children and a career, eventually confessing her hopeless state to her husband, saying, “I have everything, and nothing.” It’s a pretty bleak assessment of her situation, but also completely understandable. Having a newborn and a young kid at the same time is kind of like joining a cult: you are always sleep deprived, screamed at, and eroded emotionally to the point of complete ego erasure.
These problems are exacerbated by the fact that the women experiencing them are, it turns out, women, and they exist within a culture that is built in large part on the energy we can drain from them. There is a running subplot involving lactation difficulty, for example, which culminates in an Office Space-style orgy of equipment destruction, the catharsis of which was palpable. It’s not the only time our heroines butt up against the pernicious expectations of our culture, but it was probably my favorite.
While not an ostentatiously political film, Babes is nonetheless radical in its focus on female friendship, childbearing, the terrible lie of “having it all” and the absolute dearth of comic book or video game content. It’s a small film about big feelings, one which makes the personal into something universal, and isn’t afraid to talk to you like you get it.
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