Oops

Obvious Child

Crit

The best abortion romantic comedy I've seen, though not the best abortion comedy. I'd have liked it a lot more but for two factors. First, the impossibly sweet and generous boy is played by Jake Lacy, who is a dead ringer for Timothy Simons, whose Jonah on Veep is impossibly unsweet and ungenerous. OK, that's my problem, not the film's.

A more legitimate complaint, I think, is that Donna (Jenny Slate), while she has a certain charm off stage, seems to think that confessional humor need only be confessional to be humorous. It seems to be an item of faith of the film that, with one grotesquely drunken exception, she is a very funny standup comic. Not being able to maintain that faith made it hard for me to extend her the slack that she requires to be either likable or particularly interesting.

Gaby Hoffmann, as Donna's doctrinaire and preachy yet somehow not off-putting best friend, steals the show, as she steals every show she's in. Maybe I should just start pointing it out if she doesn't steal the show.