Obvious Child

"Obvious Child" (2014, Gillian Robespierre) is a ninety minute advertisement for abortion masquerading as a romantic comedy.  It would seem that abortion doesn't really require a glossy commercial proselytizing for the procedure and so the film feels a little bit unnecessary.  Jenny Slate  plays a stand-up comedian, dumped by her boyfriend in the opening minutes of the film.  One sympathizes with boyfriend -- Slate's character indulges in raw confessional comedy involving lots of poop and fart jokes and her stand-up routine isn't funny by any stretch of the imagination; it's just irritating, narcissistic, and embarrassing.  Being jilted drives the young woman into a funk and she becomes even more unfunny, more desperate, and more confrontational in her comedy routine.  (As one might expect, she has an openly gay buddy who makes snarky, humorous remarks and a politically engaged feminist friend who looks like Frida Kahlo and who delivers the film's moral.)  But, then, she meets an improbably nice guy, has sex with him, and ends up pregnant.  In a romantic comedy, a mismatched couple "meets cute," falls in love, and, then, their relationship must overcome some sort of complication since the course of true love does not ever, as they say, "run true."  In "Obvious Child", the complication is the young woman's immediate knee-jerk decision to have an abortion.  (Ads for the film suggest that the heroine ponders this decision; this is untrue -- she opts for the abortion the moment she is told she is pregnant).  For reasons that seem to me medically implausible, the procedure is delayed for two weeks.  In this two-week interval, the heroine again assaults her unfortunate audience at the comedy club with remarkably unfunny material about abortion.  The girl's new boyfriend sees the performance, is appalled, but because he is a gentleman attends the abortion with her and, perhaps, may "go steady" with her in the future -- I think most female members of the audience will doubt that the relationship has any future:  the guy is simply too good for the unpleasant heroine.  The movie has a few clever lines and it's never offensive.  But the picture simply isn't funny.  You know a movie is floundering when the filmmaker resorts to reaction shots showing people laughing uproariously at the heroine's stand-up routine.  When the protagonist inflicts a series of crude abortion jokes on the comedy club audience, the film cuts to handsome-looking and stylish women all laughing merrily at the material -- but in the showing of the film that I attended, no one in the movie theater was laughing.  The picture is trite and predictable:  the sex scene is orchestrated to Paul Simon's song "Obvious Child" and cut like a Pepsi-Cola commercial: rambunctious, attractive young people dancing happily.  The movie promotes abortion in several ways.  First, the procedure is described repeatedly as convenient, painless, swift and efficient -- I hope this is true.  Second, every woman in the movie has had an abortion and all of them are happy about the outcome.  No one shows even a trace of regret.  (When the heroine tells her mother she is going to have an abortion, mom simply smiles and describes her own abortion.)  Third, after the procedure, we are shown a room of women waiting to be released from the clinic:  without exception, they are slender, beautiful, elegant, one of them wearing a nice wedding ring.  Would the movie's pro-choice position be attenuated if even one of the women were depicted as a little bit overweight or homely?  Furthermore, my wife, who worked for Planned Parenthood, advised me that she thought the film was technically inaccurate in several respects -- it's as if the people who made this picture advertising abortion never had the procedure themselves.  There's not much to this movie.  I greatly admire Lena Dunham, who has nothing to do with this comedy, and wish that she had made this movie, not the cautious, self-aggrandizing Jenny Slate.  (I saw this show at the Cape Movie Theater in north Dennis on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.  The theater is an old New England meeting house, a kind of white-washed barn, but it contains a wonderful mural by Rockwell Kent.  The mural is painted in Jugendstil or art nouveau, featuring nude lovers who occupy a band across the vaulted ceiling of the theater -- the lovers are elongated with exaggerated bulbous buttocks and their courtship, in various phases, swirls across in deep blue sky.  To the rear of the hall a huge golden bull confronts a similarly gilded greyhound.  At the head of the theater, above the screen, a man and woman contend for a glowing orb, something like a soccer ball, but, apparently, representing the sun.  Kent refused to enter the State of Massachusetts as a protest over the Sacco and Vanzetti criminal proceedings -- he designed the murals and had a team of assistants execute them in 1930 in the playhouse.  The mural made the movie worth seeing.)