Obvious Child

Obvious Child
Directed by Gillian Robespierre
Starring Jenny Slate, Gabby Hoffman, Jake Lacy
My Opinion: Grounded in realism, heartfelt, brilliantly witty.

It's not often that I watch a romantic comedy gleefully. While Obvious Child is undoubtedly in that category, I hadn't heard of it until last I was home and my father handed me the Netflix envelope. "I've been saving this one for you," he said. As of late, my favorite films star strong women, sometimes American and others not, who fighting against the vulnerability that the harsh world demands of them until finally exposing themselves to their reality and ultimately prevailing, in the words of the pop goddess, "stronger than yesterday." In Obvious Child, Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) is like a young Liz Lemon, just a tad more comfortable in her own skin and getting laid more. 

Donna is a comedian, who spends her days working at a doomed bookstore and her nights opening the door to her personal life for a crowd of strangers at a comedy club. Her jokes are raw and crude: my favorite being the opening sequences which she describes day old underwear as something that looks like it has army crawled out of a tub of cream cheese. Fed up with the nightly exposé on their relationship, Donna's boyfriend dumps her. Soon, Donna finds herself pregnant from a one-night-stand and jobless, the walls of adulthood closing in to suffocate her

Obvious Child stands out from the plethora of mediocrity that descended on theaters in 2014. It's intelligent and wry, yet brash and wholly realistic. Without exposing the touching ending, I'll only share that it is essentially the adult's antithesis to Juno without a precious soundtrack. Hollywood needs more strong female leads like Slate if it's going to survive in the modern age. Feminists are watching movies too.