I heard from a friend who loves Jenny Slate (Saturday Night Live) that this movie was really fun and engaging… and that it’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime! Woohooo! Win – win! Rotten Tomatoes shows a 90% fresh rating!
I made it about forty minutes in before I started writing this and another ten before I turned it off. Afterwards, I had to watch a Southpark episode to keep from drinking a fifth of Jack, drunk-texting my ex’s all at once and crying myself to sleep.
If you take a perfectly good blender and puree together Better Off Dead with My Big Fat Greek Wedding, then dilute out any spice or flavor that might have made it good and serve it on wet cardboard… you’ll have Obvious Child. This movie could have been a heartwarming drama/comedy, but for some reason the actors made all the jokes in it really gross and completely unfunny, and they made the drama genuinely boring. Every single character awkwardly spent at least the first 45 minutes of the movie trying to make Donna (Jenny Slate) happy. Unfortunately, Donna does nothing but whine, get drunk constantly and insult everyone around her.
Perpetually unhappy with life, Donna is a NYC stand up comic who is losing her apartment, her job and her boyfriend all in one night. Somehow, she gets together with a strange new guy named Ryan (Paul Briganti) who watched her stand up that night. She gets drunk of course, and three weeks later finds out she’s pregnant. She immediately wants an abortion and the middle section of the flick is basically Donna’s warring with herself about telling him anything about it.
I don’t know if this was supposed to be a comedy or a drama with a comedian for it’s lead actress, but it was depressing as hell. The problem I had with it is I didn’t feel any connection to anyone on set. Donna whined and got drunk all the time, then reacted to her mistakes after the fact constantly. Ryan, for some reason, liked her even after she continuously insulted him and turned his interest in her down. I called BS… even the nicest guy would have walked away much earlier in the story.
Socially awkward on almost every level, the adults in this movie make the kids in Napoleon Dynamite look like slick politicians. Everyone in this one tried to be funny with the material they had to work with, while tackling the abortion issue, but the dark, trashy humor dripping from my TV screen was so squirmworthy I actually winced a few times. The only time I laughed um… snickered um… sort of grinned while exhaling at a joke was when Ryan was pissing in public after getting drunk with Donna and as she sat behind him, farted in her face.
I’m not making this up!
Oddly enough, this is where they begin their romance. My wife finally got up and left the room while I was typing this up and I just hit the “Stop” button.
If you like Jenny Slate’s humor on SNL, this may be something you’ll enjoy. Maybe I’m just not getting it. But I felt this one lacked direction as if the director filmed without a script and just decided to go with whatever.