Of all the messy-women comedies engendered by the success of Bridesmaids, Gillian Robespierre's low-key charmer might be the slyest. It's a thoughtful treatise on female choice couched as a raucous character study, landing no-holds-barred Brooklyn stand-up Donna (Jenny Slate) with an accidental pregnancy, and thereby forcing her to get serious with the body she's been strip-mining for laughs. That Donna keeps bumping into her inseminator is a contrivance that only makes her decision trickier: Jake Lacy's Max is no deadbeat dad, but a chivalrous prospect who happens to have fumbled the condom. Some of this material still sounds like a straightened-out routine, but its stronger stretches approach the personal, defiantly unemphatic territory of TV's Louie: Robespierre and Slate deserve credit for nudging the abortion narrative away from scaremongering horror, and back towards, if not an entirely happy ending, then at least something a girl might get a joke or two out of.
Obvious Child review – a non-scaremongering abortion story
Brooklyn standup Jenny Slate shines in Gillian Robespierre's sly and thoughtful treatise on female choice, writes Mike McCahill