Mike McCahill 

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
  
  

Obvious Child
Jake Lacy and Jenny Slate in Obvious Child. Photograph: c.A24/Everett/REX Photograph: c.A24/Everett/REX

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.

 

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