Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) is a New York City standup comedienne who likes to joke about her vagina and the Holocaust in confessional routines, and though this is not her main source of income, she is doing pretty well at her favourite club. That is until tonight when she has just left the stage with another satisfied audience behind her and ventures into the lavatory whereupon she is confronted by the man she has just been mentioning in her act, her boyfriend, who announces he doesn't see a future for them and anyway, he has been seeing someone else. All this while constantly checking his phone; it's too much for Donna who is sent into a funk of misery for the next few days...
But it's all happening in Donna's life, as we see when she meets someone else herself, only it's not under the greatest of circumstances. Obvious Child was a romcom with a brave subject matter which left it open to criticism, a subject which emerged about half an hour in after we had settled down with Donna and her woes. She may be the queen of the raunchy female-centric joke in that club, but when it concerns the outside world she is a mess, close to leaving her twenties behind with nothing much to show for it: no boyfriend now he's exited with some blonde, and now no job when the book store she works in is closed down - the standup won't pay the bills, so what will she do now, adrift in life?
There's nothing like a crisis to bring about clarity, but what Donna achieves is, well, nothing like clarity so when, after a self-lacerating bunch of routines she is having a drink with one of her pals Joey (Gabe Liedman) she gets to talking to a personable young man called Max (Jake Lacy), and before they know what is happening they are absolutely hammered and jumping (OK, more stumbling) into bed with one another. Although the mainstream romcom wouldn't think to consider this, in indie romcom world the theme was fair game, so when, a few days after the one night stand Donna is complaining of aches and pains her other best friend Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) jokes she might be pregnant. Which turns out to be the case, and unlike a movie like Knocked Up, Donna has to weigh her options.
She makes the decision to have an abortion, which Hollywood would have run a mile from, but with director Gillian Robespierre is the chance to actually take on the issue with humour, sympathy and intelligence rather than kneejerk attitudes, in itself refreshing as Donna isn't such a bad sort, she simply has yet to find an even keel and having a baby wouldn't help her in the least. In the couple of weeks it takes for her appointment for the termination to arrive, she meets Max again, but can't pluck up the courage to admit what's happened, preferring to tentatively make forward steps to seeing him, then in typical fashion take backward steps when she gets uncomfortable with intimacy and something she cannot make her usual line in defensive jokes about.
That's part of the problem when Obvious Child attempts humour, which is often, as Donna is such a bundle of neuroses that her gags come across as what they are, scathingly self-deprecating to both hide her self esteem issues and covertly admit to the person she's communicating with that she's actually a damaged soul who could do with a lot of tender loving care. It's not as if she has terrible people around her, once the boyfriend is out the way she has a lot of support from her parents (Richard Kind and Polly Draper) and those aforementioned buddies (though even they have been made rather bitter by life), she just desperately needs to be loved and accepted by a better half. This neediness tends to sabotage the laughs though it's never less than goodnatured, and the coarse humour seems to be there because Bridesmaids did it (not a drawback exclusive to this) when the sweeter moments are more amusing. Also, it appears to have been named after the Paul Simon song on condition it was prominently featured in a dance routine. Nice enough on a serious issue. Music by Chris Bordeaux.
