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Babes Revels in the Grossness of Pregnancy

But the Michelle Buteau and Ilana Glazer comedy is better when it’s focused on their characters’ bittersweet friendship.

But however righteous, the desire to reclaim an experience that has been sanctified and politicized and cloaked in euphemism is a pretty abstract thing on which to base a movie, and Babes is so intent on delivering extended jokes about lactation anxiety-driven hallucinations and the size of amnio needles that its ends up feeling (I’m so sorry) labored. There’s a lot to explore here, from the upper middle class precarity of Dawn and Marty’s double income Manhattanite existence to the way that Eden, whose agoraphobic father Bernie (Oliver Platt) appears for a scene of quiet pathos, really doesn’t have anyone else in her life to rely on aside from her bestie. Jokes are mined from Dawn’s labor shits and her acquisition of an industrial strength breast pump, the doctor (John Carroll Lynch) who explains that “genetic testing is necessarily racist,” and a hormonal Eden getting worked up over phallic vegetables and staging a Beyoncé-style florals-and-veil photoshoot for herself.

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