There is a scene in Babes, the new film directed by Pamela Adlon and written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, in which Eden (Glazer) and her best friend, Dawn (Michelle Buteau), confront their differing assessments of their relationship. They are committed to each other, but at different places in their lives. Eden is expecting her first child (the friends are on a kind of weekend babymoon) and leaning on Dawn for support, even suggesting that she move into the bottom floor of Dawn’s brownstone once she gives birth. Dawn, who is weighed down by the demands of parenting two young children and embracing the momentary escape, bristles. “I have a family,” she snaps, drawing a stark line between her nuclear cohort and the bond she shares with Eden.
Because of its outlandish tone (Whoopi Goldberg voices Dawn s breasts, for example) and the trajectory of its plot, Babes is being lauded as pregnancy raunch, with much of the coverage focusing on the “gross-out” elements. It’s an odd (sexist?) framing, given that, as Adlon points out when we meet, she is “just literally showing pregnancy.” The topic—and sexism in general—is especially front of mind for Adlon, who fumes at the recent removal of an ad in Times Square that showed a pregnant woman’s belly. (It’s since been reinstated.) Meanwhile, she points out to me, Jennifer Lopez in a bra and panties is plastered on 20-foot-tall billboards around the corner from her hotel. And she’s just as incredulous when a man in a tech-bro vest loudly conducts his call right in front of our table, almost drowning out my questions. “Can you believe that?” she asks with barely contained exasperation.
But the focus on Babes’ bodily agenda somewhat obscures the emotional subtext of the film, which shows a friendship formed in youth fraying under the pressures of later phases of life: marriage, child-rearing, home ownership (with unpredictable plumbing). “Dawn is hitting all the milestones,” says Adlon. “She has a boyfriend, then she gets married, then she has a baby, then she’s pregnant, she has the house, the job, all of it. And Eden’s like, Please stop having milestones without me.” The two characters are drawn together like magnets, their affinity for one another pulling them across the boroughs of New York City (much is made of the three-train commute), but they also increasingly realize that any bond that isn’t cultivated withers, and even the nurturing of friendships that sustain you requires work.
Adlon’s feature directorial debut is about the physicalities and comedy of pregnancy, but it is also a loving ode to friendship. It’s a film that asks, at the end: What if we did make friendship one of the top organizing principles of our lives?
Adlon is, I should say, deeply invested in her own family. A single mother whose ex-husband was, she tells me, “famously not great,” she raised three daughters on her own, and bought a house so that her mother could live next door. (To anyone familiar with Adlon’s tour-de-force series Better Things, these details will sound familiar; her character’s life closely mimicked Adlon’s own.) Right now, she tells me she is “obsessed with [her] mother,” who is experiencing some of the health struggles that come with getting older, and being tended to in Adlon’s absence by her third daughter.
But when her daughters were all busy one night, she called a friend to pick up the baton on Nana-watch. Her friends are clearly also her obsession, and while she rattles off their names like they are also my old friends, Adlon is also making new ones all the time. When we first meet in the lobby, I have to interrupt a conversation she’s having with an artist who is also staying at the hotel; Adlon is practically trailing her out the door so that she can get the location of her new show and pay a visit. At the hotel restaurant, she greets the host and server by name, then tells me that when the hotel was filled with “children” (she means 20-somethings) on Friday night, she first checked on a drunk kid who was passed out in the corner, then brought pizza slices to the doormen (Byron and Jermaine). “I haven’t been in a romantic relationship in years—years,” she says. “And I don’t miss it. I am so fulfilled.”
Though Adlon didn’t write Babes, she was there “to guide the script,” she says. Sometimes that meant adding music or “choreography”; she tells me that she conceived of the whole opening montage, which tracks Dawn’s labor and the birth of her second child to the tune of “But the World Goes Round,” as a musical number. She scoped out locations in New York—“it was like casting another character”—personally poking around Sugar Hill brownstones that were 100 years old, and offering encouragement to her lead actors, who were wearing faux pregnancy bellies in 100-degree heat for much of the filming. And I can’t help thinking that the philosophy on friendship that she sketches for me provided some of the background fabric of this film, and helped build the emotional wallop that it delivers at the end.
Adlon describes to me times when her friends have anticipated not just the logistical support needed to take care of an aging mother, but emotional needs she wasn’t herself aware of. “Some of the greatest acts of friendship that I’ve encountered are when I was going through a hard time,” she says. When Babes debuted at SXSW this spring, her friends formed an entourage. “No more alone” was their mantra, and when I ask her what that meant, she explains that despite her bullish charm and immediate charisma, she is often on her own: “I’m alone for all of us. I make the movie alone. I make my show alone. I do the press—I mean, particularly the press; at the end of the day, I’m just sitting there.” I think about a recurring scene in Better Things in which Adlon’s protagonist, Sam, is trying to fix her faulty toilet; there was no one else to do it.
At one point in our interview, Adlon pulled me in for a hug, and so potent is her maternal warmth that the gesture felt entirely genuine. (Were we now friends?) And then, at the end of the interview, I went home to my family, and she probably FaceTimed hers. Modern life, with its fractured comings and goings, is not set up to encourage the fostering of friendship—new or otherwise—above all else, and certainly not above the demands of family. We’re more likely to let our careers, the real estate market, or school zones dictate our geographical destinies, even though proximity to a close network of friends is a prime predictor of happiness. (If you live within a mile of a friend, it’s been said, you are 25% more likely to feel happy—how they measure this, I have no idea, but I don’t find it that surprising.) But Babes offers up an alternative: the idea that maturity does not have to mean the narrowing of intimacy to the nuclear family. There’s a lot to gain from friends, wherever they’re from.
Babes is in theaters now in New York and L.A., and opens with a wide release tomorrow.
