‘Babes’ is a much-too-improvised baby buddy comedy

A bunch of very talented people, led by Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau and Pamela Adlon, have come together to make a mediocre comedy that took all the wrong lessons from the Apatow era.

(Note: Normally, I would review a documentary in this space, but this week’s selection has an embargo date, which is early Friday morning. So look for that tomorrow, and enjoy this extra feature film review.)

Judd Apatow, with movies he directed and sometimes wrote or produced, ruled movie comedy in the aughts and 2010s with a distinct formula: Gather a bunch of talented and funny people, let them riff, and amid all the dirty jokes and bodily fluids, make the central story about the maladjusted protagonist learning to mature and embrace the responsibilities of adulthood. 

However, Apatow’s era of dominance is in the rearview mirror, to the point that the director recently fired his agents of 30 years due to his inability to get a movie made recently. 

So now we have a new comedy, Babes, that, despite Judd Apatow’s lack of involvement, is an obvious throwback to the Apatow heyday. It just learned all the wrong lessons from those movies. 

Rolling out this week, Babes is a rare comedy release from NEON. It features plenty of talented people (Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, Hasan Minhaj, and director Pamela Adlon) and a high concept. There’s also riffing and mugging—so much riffing and mugging. 

So much time is taken up with the performers’ improvisational stylings that a movie with about 45 minutes of plot gets dragged out to 109 minutes; it’s further in the Apatow tradition for his comedies to have ridiculously long running times. 

Plus, applying this formula to a woman-centered narrative or a movie about pregnancy is not all that groundbreaking since Apatow made movies (Trainwreck and Knocked Up, respectively) that did both.  Plus, Glazer already appeared in a film about the horrors of pregnancy (in 2021, she starred in a Rosemary’s Baby-style body horror movie called False Positive, best known for Pierce Brosnan’s turn as an evil gynecologist; that film, while a bit of a misfire was a much more sympathetic portrayal of pregnancy than Babes is.) 

It’s a shame, though, because the film’s premise has some potential for good storytelling- especially since it’s the feature directorial debut of Adlon, who created the fantastic TV series Better Things, which dealt a lot with the less-glamorous side of motherhood. 

Babes stars Buteau (Dawn) and Glazer (Eden) as a pair of lifelong best friends whose friendship is beginning to fray. This is partly because Dawn is married and about to have her second child, and Eden is single and childless. This is, in fact, a thing that happens a lot—when people have kids, they tend to become friends with other parents, often leaving their single friends behind. 

However, the dynamic changes when Eden gets pregnant herself, with the father of her child (Stephan James, from the great If Beale Street Could Talk) discarded from the movie in a shockingly callous way. 

There’s lots of scatological humor about breast milk, water breaking, pooping during labor, and other pregnancy-related bodily fluids. And yes, we get that scene I always hate when the characters get stoned, although it’s less excruciating here than usual.

The problem is that the extended improv makes every scene seem to last forever—especially since the film is full of single-scene guest performers (Sandra Bernhard, Kenny and Keith Lucas) who show up, do their schtick, and then leave. 

John Carroll Lynch shows up as a gynecologist and the subject of a deathly running joke about his hairpiece that takes a break from lifting humor from the aughts to grab it from the 1980s instead. Oliver Platt plays Glazer’s long-estranged dad, who seems to be in a different movie than every other character; his character feels like he should have another scene to complete his redemption arc but never does. 

Most of the people here have done much better work. Ilana Glazer co-created and starred in the excellent TV series Broad City, although her efforts, whether in movies or stand-up comedy, have been a bit more lackluster since then. Broad City was often raunchy, but it had a wit that this movie lacks.

From the TV series Survival of the Thickest, Buteau is reasonably funny, while Minhaj mostly plays the straight man here and rarely gets to do anything comedic.  

As for Adlon, she does a lot of clearly Woody Allen-influenced photography of New York City, but this movie needed to be way tighter.