Obvious Child
Director: Gillian Robespierre
Talent: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffmann, Gabe Liedman
Release Date: 22nd August 2014
It takes a special kind of courage to write a film in which nothing bad happens, nobody does anyone else any harm, and noone dies. That is Obvious Child, a romantic comedy “about” abortion, in which Donna (Jenny Slate), a stand-up comedian from Brooklyn, has a one-night-stand with a strait-laced businessman (Jake Lacy) that leaves her with more than she had bargained for. Over the course of the film, the businessman, her parents and her friends are nice and supportive of her. This is a film about texture more than about story, and the texture is a familiar one: the experiences of a white gentrifying class reframed as universal or ‘normal’, but whose normality is never the subject of interrogation. It is a texture that, as such, eats narrative, that destroys its possibility. Occasionally funny, middlebrow pabulum.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
For more film coverage this month, see our reviews of Moebius, The Hundred Foot Journey, The Congress, Million Dollar Arm, Into The Storm, Deliver Us From Evil, The Expendables 3 and We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.
