Review of Obvious Child (2014) by Mike C — 10 Jan 2015

I haven't thrown out a "Bravo" in some time (movies I rate at 9/10 or above) but this comes pretty close at 8.5. No secrets here: she has an abortion. And it's a comedy. A lot of people, evidently, cannot reconcile that in their minds. But because everything in this movie is very much in the realm of human behavior, I respect what they did with the story.

The stand-up in this movie is awful. I barely laughed. Unfortunately, the opening scene was her stand-up and nearly set an awful tone for the duration. I'd heard nothing but good things about this movie, though, so despite not really being a Jenny Slate fan, I stuck it out. And I'm glad I did.

I'm not going to make this a political review. As I said above, abortion is something we have in our society and I'm not always opposed to it. I've probably read more about it than you have. So that's what this movie is about: a young, directionless woman has a fling of sorts and ends up pregnant. She's in no shape to raise a child so decides to have an abortion.

A lot of people take offense to 1. the abortion and 2. the way she talks about it. Anyone who knows anything knows comedy is a defense mechanism so I actually have no problem with this. If anything, I thought it adds to the movie and the situation because it made sense to me that a woman like this would talk like that.

If you can remove that from the equation...that a realistic character made a realistic life choice, what you're left with is almost a nice romantic comedy. The young gentleman proves to be an exceptional character, and Slate becomes quite likable herself. The banter between them is great and I actually laughed out loud a lot...just rarely at the stand-up bits.

So yeah, there's an abortion in here. I don't see the movie as having an agenda one way or the other, it's just a plausible story with some decent characters and some good banter. And I liked it.