Earlier this year we had the reboot of Mean Girls a film that saw girls being…..well, mean to each other but Babes plays that other end of the spectrum and celebrates female friendships. Those friends here are Eden (Ilana Glazer – also the co-writer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) who are doing their annual 27 year old Thanksgiving ritual of seeing a movie together at 9am. It’s soon curtailed when the heavily pregnant Dawn goes into labour with her second child. Best buddies since they were 11 years old there’s little they will not do for each other which serves to justify the first of many gross out scenes as Eden checks out Dawn’s level of dilation.
It’s after Eden leaves the hospital where Dawn has had her baby that she encounters Claude (Stephen James), an actor just finished a day shooting a small role in a Scorsese movie, and a swift romance follows with Eden finding herself unexpectedly pregnant but now being ghosted by Claude in an awkward and unsure footed reveal that turns out not to be a joke. For both Eden and Dawn their current situation means their future friendship becomes uncertain. Dawn now has the turmoil of raising two young children, a return to her work as a dental nurse, a husband with his own issues and an apartment with a pongy plumbing problem. Eden on the other hand juggles with an unexpected first time pregnancy and an absent father and the friends time for each other is stretched to breaking point. It’s a truism that the film addresses that life in such circumstances becomes messy.
There’s a lot of banter here amongst the bodily functions which veer between gross out and cringe, taking in as it does lactating, peeing children, breaking water with simultaneous childbirth and pooping. Some of it raises a smile, much of it doesn’t and several scenes play out without a decent payoff – a massage scene where they both go for a luxury spa day just peters out. Oliver Platt, long absent from the big screen , puts in a fleeting cameo and Sandra Bernhard, another big screen absentee, returns in a forgettable role. It’s an awkward balance between gross out laughs which are mostly just gross Babes needs a director like Paul Feig whose so good with female comedy casts. But at the centre of this is the friendship between women bonding over a natural ability to help each other and be there when it most matters that is the real strength of the film.
related feature : Meet the Plastics – the real Mean Girls!
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Here’s the Babes trailer….
