‘Babes’ Review: Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau Are a Couple of Babes Raising Some Babes

May 15, 2024

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Hey, Babe. (CREDIT: Gwen Capistran/NEON)

Starring: Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, Hasan Minhaj, John Carroll Lynch, Stephan James, Sandra Bernhard, Oliver Platt

Director: Pamela Adlon

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: R for Filterless Conversations

Release Date: May 17, 2024 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) are at that stage of life when maintaining annual traditions necessitates taking four different subway lines and futilely attempting to have one last great restaurant feast before going into labor. They’re the titular Babes, insofar as that’s a term of endearment for platonic life partners. But “Babes” also refers to actual children, who make quite an impression on this story. There’s Dawn’s toddler son, who’s quite the handful when he starts regressing after his new baby sister arrives. And then there’s the bun growing in Eden’s oven after a life-changing one-night stand. When she decides to keep the baby, Dawn is right there to support her along the whole journey, but this could just be the ultimate test of their friendship.

What Made an Impression?: Same City, New Broads: In addition to starring, Glazer co-wrote the screenplay of Babes (alongside Josh Rabinowitz), while Pamela Adlon handled directing duties (in her feature debut). Glazer is best known for the Comedy Central sitcom Broad City, which she co-created and co-starred in along with her good buddy Abbi Jacobson, while Adlon is most recently known for the FX sitcom Better Things. While I’m sure there’s plenty of overlap in the fandom of those shows (myself included), they represent two tonal extremes. Whereas Broad City is whimsical and boisterous, Better Things is much more low-key and sarcastic. Glazer and Adlon’s collaboration unsurprisingly turns out to be a real peanut butter-and-hot sauce situation, with the slang-heavy exaggerated dialogue that is Glazer’s calling card proving to be an odd fit with the more grounded approach of just about everyone else in Babes. But that clashing sensibility might just be the point. One could theorize that Better Things is the mellowed, middle age version of Broad City, with Babes serving as the missing link to motherhood in between.
A Question of Family: One common reason for friendships drifting apart is the onset of parenthood for one friend, while others remain childless. But what Babes presupposes is, maybe that drifting apart can happen even when both friends are having kids. In the case of Eden and Dawn, it’s a matter of evolving values and possibly incompatible expectations of their relationship. The way Eden sees it, she and Dawn are more family than friends, especially because they’ve known each other longer than Dawn has known her husband (Hasan Minhaj) or either of her kids. Alas, her perhaps co-dependent demands to maintain some sort of status quo don’t sufficiently reckon with practical matters of reality. Nevertheless, her desire brings up a fair and urgent crossroads that demands to be answered: when friendship stops being convenient, how do you define the terms in which you show up for each other?
Use Your Head: If you were a regular viewer of The Drew Carey Show in the 90s and early 2000s, and a time-traveling visitor from the 2020s showed up and asked you to guess which cast member of that sitcom would eventually play a gynecologist who tries to please his wife with a series of toupees and other ineffective baldness solutions, do you think you could correctly guess the answer? Of course you could! Who else could it be besides John Carroll Lynch?! As Eden’s OB-GYN, he’s a sadsack clown of a man. But he’s also a fully trustworthy professional. In other words, he’s exactly the sort of medical figure who can manage to sufficiently match wits with an Ilana Glazer character and guide her into the messy miracle that is a vagina yawning wide enough to release a new human into the world. John Carroll Lynch: Total Babe.

Babes is Recommended If You Like: Stretching out your vowels, The messy fluids of life, Character actor dads

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Breast Pumps

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Professor Marston and the Wonder Women’ is a Love(s) Story Like No Other

October 10, 2017

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CREDIT: Claire Folger/Annapurna Pictures

This review was originally posted on News Cult in October 2017.

Starring: Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcote, Connie Britton, Oliver Platt

Director: Angela Robinson

Running Time: 108 Minutes

Rating: R for Getting It On Unapologetically

Release Date: October 13, 2017

I think every man, woman, boy, girl, or whatever personal nomenclature you prefer should go and be inspired by Wonder Woman. I also want to recommend just as wholeheartedly Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, the story of Wonder Woman’s creator and his inspiration, but fair warning: William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) lived an unprecedented life, by any era’s standards. His biography is not absolutely necessary to understand the context of Diana Prince, but it is enlightening. His story is also alarming, but also ultimately joyous, and that is true especially in light of the Wonder Woman film so pointedly emphasizing Diana’s prerogative to protect all life.

To get right into it: Marston did not come into comic books through publishing or 9-to-5 hackery, but rather psychology and academia. He is noted for developing DISC Theory, which proposes that all human behavior can be categorized as either dominance, inducement, submission, or compliance. To be clear, this is not just sexual behavior he is talking about, but all human behavior. If you’re wondering if a guy like this would be intrigued by sexual bondage, then your instincts are correct. However, if you’re also thinking that this part of the story has nothing to do with the creation of Wonder Woman, you clearly have not read her early issues. Marston is also famous for inventing an early lie detector prototype, and now that are you are remembering the Lasso of Truth, it should be abundantly clear how his ideas have lived on.

But while all that history is important to the film, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is a love story through and through, and an unapologetically nontraditional one. Marston and his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston (Rebecca Hall), a fellow psychologist, lived with another woman, Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), lover to them both. If this arrangement sounds like misogyny lurking underneath a supposed ally of women, well, this staunchly feminist does not see it that way, and neither do its staunchly feminist characters. Instead, Bill, Elizabeth, and Olive, in their decision to live together in defiance of society’s standards, are positioned as self-sacrificing heroes ahead of their time. This is true perhaps in the sense that as the inspirations of an iconic fictional character, the ladies’ legacy lives on. But it is not exactly true (at least not yet) in the sense that polyamory is still far from normal.

Personally, I do not object to polyamory on any moral grounds, but rather, because I find the prospect emotionally exhausting. But damn if Professor Marston doesn’t have me cheering for those who believe in it. There is no doubt that this trio are in fact deeply in love with each other. A series of lie detector scenes make that effervescently clear. These moments may be cinematic contrivances, but I don’t care, as they are so entertainingly bold! Indeed, it is rare to find any major theatrical release whose social and romantic politics are so unapologetic, and for that, it should be cherished.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is Recommended If You Like: Wonder Woman comics – the classic and the obscure stuff, Jules and Jim, Shakespeare in Love, Secretary

Grade: 4 out of 5 Lie Detectors