'Obvious Child' Mines Comedy From a Non-Obvious Source
'Obvious Child' is a breakthrough film, and not just because of the abortion plotline.
Actress Jenny Slate stars in "Obvious Child," by writer/director Gillian Robespierre, about a woman in her late 20s who decides to get an abortion.
According to Planned Parenthood, three in ten women in the United States gets an abortion by the time they're 45, but film screens have failed to represent those numbers in the 40 years since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion.
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The new film “Obvious Child” may help to change that. In it, Donna (Jenny Slate), an aspiring comedian in her late 20s struggling to get her life off the ground after a bad break-up and losing her job, gets pregnant after a one night stand. The film never questions her decision to abort the pregnancy, but it uses the event to tell a number of other stories: about Donna’s friendship with her roommate Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann), about her complicated relationship with her parents (Richard Kind and Polly Draper) and about her unlikely romance with the guy (Jake Lacy) -- decidedly not Donna’s type -- who knocked her up.
It is also very funny.
“The romantic comedy genre has been very mainstream and in that mainstream, it hasn’t felt comfortable [about abortion] for one reason or another, because of that stigma to tell a more modern story,” Slate told U.S. News.
"Obvious Child" writer and director Gillian Robespierre added, “We don’t feel like women should feel judgement for making this choice. It's private and complex, but it doesn’t need to be riddled with guilt.”
The movie feels like a breakthrough and not just because it takes abortion head on. Donna’s stand-up routine, as well as her daily life, is filled with humorous discussion of the less than glamorous aspects of female bodies and sexuality, including lots of fart jokes.
“That’s the kind of stuff I like to talk about,” Robespierre said. “Jenny and I are both similar in that we have very similar tastes in humor and what tickles us. Usually that's gynecological humor. It’s also humor about taking the reality of what’s going on with our bodies, our faces and kind of spinning a little joke on to it. “
Slate, who had worked with Robespierre on a 2009 short film prototype of “Obvious Child,” said she was excited by the script because “it paid such close attention to the way people of our generation naturally talk.”
"It really plugged into a vernacular I find to be really delightful and descriptive and really authentic," Slate said.
And though it retains the boy-meets-girl structure of a romantic comedy, “Obvious Child” also features a number of nuanced interactions between its female characters in an era when too many films still fail the Bechdel test.
"I like mother-daughter relationships in real life and in movies. We just wanted to figure one that wasn't so black and white,” Robespierre said, and a pivotal point in the movie is when Donna’s mother tells Donna about her own pre-Roe abortion experience. “That's what happens in your late 20s -- you and your mom, your relationship changes.”
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But just because Robespierre wanted the film to be about more than just abortion doesn’t mean she glossed over the details of the procedure. Planned Parenthood agreed to vet her script and even allowed the film to shoot it in its New Rochelle, New York, clinic.
“I didn’t want any of the dialogue between the friends and the mothers to not feel realistic, and that goes for the same with doctor-Donna scenes. I didn’t want to write doctor dialogue based on an ‘ER’ episode I had seen,” Robespierre said. “[Planned Parenthood] just had a few tweaks. It’s not like they said, ‘Donna shouldn’t talk about discharge.’ They left the jokes to us and they really just focused in on the scenes and made sure that the doctor didn’t say anything that was false or unrealistic.”
Speaking of jokes -- of which there are plenty in “Obvious Child” -- Robespierre said she didn’t let the touchy topics or serious subject matter restrict any of the film’s potential for humor.
“The only time we pulled back on jokes is when they weren't funny,” she said.
Some of those jokes may offend: “You are going to kill it out there,” Nellie wishes Donna before a stand-up routine, to which Donna wise-cracks back, “I actually have an appointment to do that tomorrow.”
But “Obvious Child” handles its abortion storyline -- culminating in a shot of Donna’s face as she undergoes the procedure -- with admirable weight and skill that has brought the film the support of organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, which participated in screenings in Washington, D.C. and New York, respectively.
It is not surprising that the abortion rights activists are rallying behind the film, considering the recent laws some states have passed limiting abortion rights. It comes with a recent movement -- be it a New York Magazine cover story or otherwise -- to make women’s abortion stories more visible.
“We live in a society where women’s rights are under attack and where things are not equal where they should be,” Slate said.
