The Wandering Review: ‘Obvious Child’

By Laurie Baron

SAN DIEGO — Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child is uneven, as debut films usually are, but it handles the serious subject at the core of its story with sensitivity. It initially seems like a feature length version of Girls with Jenny Slate of Parks and Recreation fame in the role of Donna Stern, a sexually liberated Jewish stand-up comedian with no inhibitions about revealing the most intimate details of her love life and bodily functions in her monologues. Her comic persona resembles that of Sarah Silverman or Amy Schumer. After a set in which she jokes about how she and her boyfriend no longer have intercourse, she is dumped by him and goes on a drinking binge to cope with her humiliation and loneliness. .

Donna draws much of her humor from her Jewish identity. She feels she possesses a certain status among Jews because she looks like Anne Frank. During her bender, she has a one-night stand with a clean cut Gentile guy named Max (Jake Lacy) whom she meets at the comedy club. To her, he is so “Christian, he’s like a Christmas tree.” She surmises that if the relationship ever became serious, she would be the Menorah that would burn down his Christmas tree. She quips that her roommate Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) dresses like a lesbian back from a Birthright trip. Donna’s father Richard Kind is an empathic teddy bear like Dustin Hoffman’s Bernie Focker and her mother (Polly Draper) initially exudes a cold practicality which is belied by a tender moment when she helps her daughter through a major life crisis.

And that crisis is whether to have an abortion when Donna realizes she is pregnant from her fling with Max. The movie’s frank portrayal of abortion as a personal choice and not a mortal crime has earned it both condemnation and praise. Condemnation has come from the usual quarters because Donna simply knows that she is not ready to be a mother and goes to a Planned Parenthood clinic for advice on how to procure an abortion. The counselor at Planned Parenthood asks Donna to examine all her options, but Donna declines. When she’s unable to locate Max, she uses one of her comedy routines to talk about her dilemma. It turns out that Mike is in the audience, but rather than dissuade her, he accompanies her to the procedure. The scene of women sitting in the recovery room after their abortions conveys strength as well as sadness, but not regret. Theirs is the antithesis of the memories of the back alley abortion Donna’s mother had when she was a college student.

The politics of abortion has limited the appeal and distribution of this film. After all, this is a romantic comedy with offensive language which treats abortion as a woman’s right which does not wrack those who undergo it with guilt. NBC has admitted that it refused to run advertisements for Obvious Child that contained the word abortion. The film never sensationalizes the issue. If the director had sought to propagandize for abortion, she would have included at least one scene of Donna running the gauntlet of protesters screaming at her as she entered a clinic or having someone from among her friends and families questioning the morality of abortion. Withstanding the temptation to turn the film into a debate, Robespierre contents herself with depicting one woman’s sincere decision not to become a mother when she is still too much of an “obvious child” herself. If that sounds like a thoughtful premise, see Obvious Child before it disappears from theatre screens.

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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University.  He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com