Babes (2024)
A buddy movie in which adulthood keeps changing the terms of the friendship.
Directed by Pamela Adlon · Written by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz · Approximately 104 minutes
Starring: Ilana Glazer · Michelle Buteau · Hasan Minhaj · John Carroll Lynch · Oliver Platt
Owner-informed draft. Built from the Letterboxd note dated 14 August 2024, with source checks and provisional expanded analysis. Verdict and advisories remain proposals.
A friendship can survive for years on the assumption that the other person will always be available in roughly the same way. Then somebody has a baby, somebody has another baby, work still exists and a perfectly ordinary request for company starts requiring the logistics of a minor military operation.
I really enjoyed Babes. It feels like both a buddy movie and a coming-of-age story. Adulthood has happened already, yet the central friendship still has growing to do. I have seen enough of these themes play out in real life for the experience to feel relatable. Affection becoming tangled with an unreasonable expectation is familiar territory.
NEON identifies Eden and Dawn as lifelong friends in different phases of adulthood. Eden's decision to have a baby after a one-night stand puts their arrangement under a new kind of pressure.
Before you watch
Pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding difficulties and parental exhaustion are central. There are strong sexual references, crude bodily humour, vomiting and a comic hallucinogenic-drug sequence. Bereavement also matters to the story. The BBFC advice supports the sexual references and drug-use warnings; a revealing loss has a separate disclosure. The comedy is warm, but the conversation about bodies is candid.
Specific content details (contains spoilers)
- The death of a person connected to the pregnancy is discussed.
They already have the shorthand
Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau make the relationship feel established through speed, familiarity and the assumption that almost any thought can be said aloud. Their conversational ease gives the disagreements something to damage. We can see why these people would want each other around before being asked to consider why that might become difficult.
Glazer gives Eden a willingness to follow an impulse well past the point at which someone else might request a plan. Buteau makes Dawn's limited reserves felt inside the affection. A friend can want to help while lacking the capacity to become another person's entire support system.
The film is strongest when both conditions remain visible. It does not have to make one woman unlovable to give the other a legitimate need.
The body keeps interrupting the schedule
Pregnancy and parenting provide physical inconveniences that are not particularly interested in a character's preferred timing. The film gives those interruptions space to be gross, funny and exhausting.
The candour helps the emotional material. A demand for support can be more understandable when the audience sees the practical work involved. Bodily comedy therefore does more than announce that these women are uninhibited; it makes the life being negotiated less abstract.
Not every broad gag has the same freshness. Some situations are organised to arrive at a familiar comic eruption. The central rapport carries the film through those passages more reliably than the novelty of the incidents does.
Coming of age after you thought you had done it
The interesting growth concerns how friendship changes without becoming less important. Eden and Dawn do not have to stop loving each other to discover that an old arrangement has become impossible.
Their conflict is about assumptions as much as commitment. Who should know when help is needed? How directly does it have to be requested? At what point does the language of being family turn another person's availability into an entitlement?
That is the element I recognised from life. The film's particular circumstances give those questions form, but the questions extend beyond motherhood. Long relationships need revised expectations as circumstances change. Discovering that can feel surprisingly adolescent even when the participants have adult responsibilities.
Pamela Adlon's direction gives the friction room without turning every disagreement into a solemn verdict on the friendship. The humour remains part of how the women know one another, including when it is no longer sufficient to solve the immediate problem.
Corny DNA
The film has broad bodily jokes and affectionate sentiment. Those are deliberate choices inside a recognisable relationship. Its warmth does not require pretending every gag is equally strong, and its warmth supports direct enjoyment. Numerical ratings remain unscored.
Verdict
Worth watching — proposed. A recommendation for the useful combination of buddy comedy and adult coming-of-age story. Glazer and Buteau give the changing friendship an emotional continuity through the broad humour. Viewers averse to pregnancy material or very candid bodily comedy have clear reasons to calibrate expectations. The central attraction is the recognition that loving a friend and knowing how to support them are continuing, imperfect tasks.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the ending and detailed analysis
The friendship gets a different daily shape
Eden learns that Claude has died. After conflict and separation, Dawn returns for the birth of Eden's daughter, Claudette. The women reconcile, and Dawn's decision to move back nearer Eden gives their renewed relationship a practical dimension. The scene account corroborates these events.
The death complicates what might otherwise be a simple argument about Eden's independence. She is deciding within a situation whose available support has changed unexpectedly. That context makes care necessary without making any one friend responsible for providing all of it.
The ending works best as a revised arrangement rather than a declaration that no further strain will occur. Closeness has to acquire routines and limits that can accommodate the people they have become. That is the coming-of-age story inside the buddy movie: the friendship continues by changing its terms.
Sources
- Owner's Letterboxd note, watched 14 August 2024; supplied directly and preserved verbatim in the editorial archive.
- NEON: direction, screenplay, principal performers and premise.
- BBFC: 104-minute cinema timing and detailed content advice.
- Supporting credits and scene corroboration; contains spoilers.
The review preserves the owner's observed-life connection without inventing their family circumstances.