Babies review – Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen embrace childlessness in breezy comedy

5 hours ago 5

It’s a question still casually and routinely asked to couples everywhere regardless of familiarity, one that many fear and some feel actively offended by: are you guys gonna have kids?

Despite living in an age where we’re supposedly more accepting of people who make choices that don’t conform to whatever dusty old standards our parents and their parents had to live by, there’s still an odd regressive judgment attached to those who dare to say no or even maybe. There’s the sad tilt of the head and maybe a “but you’d make such great parents” on top, as if either would make a difference to one of life’s biggest decisions. It’s a question that writer-director Lauren Miller Rogen knows all too well and as the wife of Seth Rogen, it’s one that has an answer that immediately becomes a headline.

She has used this frustration to fuel Babies, a mostly likable if a little run-of-the-mill comedy about a couple faced with similarly intrusive questioning. She has recruited her husband and paired him with Anna Kendrick, the pair playing the Los Angeles couple of Aaron and Annie. We meet them at a pool party with friends that, as of recent years, has turned into more of a kids’ party. Annie’s voiceover, a rather lazy and inconsistently used device that the film could do without, informs us that she is almost constantly weighing up the pros and cons, laid out as we see her moon after a cute kid before expressing repulsion at them another having a tantrum. It’s creating a gap with Aaron’s friends (who don’t have as much time as he has to delve into the Bosch universe, one of the script’s funnier jokes), but more so with Annie’s friends Becky and Eliza, played by Issa Rae and Kate Berlant, whose lives are constricting, offering less space for her. The decision is both helped and hindered by Aaron’s easygoing nature, a loving husband but one who doesn’t seem to care either way, allowing her to make the choice.

When Eliza leaves her husband (Dan Stevens) she invites herself, with daughter Eve (a child Annie actually likes), to stay with Annie and Aaron until they can find a better solution. “Having a kid in the house will push us in a direction,” Annie tells Aaron – although it’s one of many occasions when we can feel Miller Rogen telling us too, as if she doesn’t trust her ability to just show us (too many conversations in the film feel like they have been had for the first time, as if the characters didn’t exist before someone yelled “action”). The couple are then forced, by the film, to see whether having a child around the house will push them closer to or further away the the idea of parenthood.

As Annie and Aaron wrestle with whether or not to parent, Miller Rogen also wrestles what kind of film she wants to be making. There’s an amiable shagginess to certain scenes (it was described as a “hangout” movie in its premiere introduction), but at other times, one can feel a strain to keep the film within a familiar, formulaic, audience-pleasing structure with so many characters and subplots that it almost feels like an extended sitcom pilot. (Her last film as director, 2018’s unremarkable Kristen Bell comedy Like Father, felt very much like one.) There’s also David Strathairn as Annie’s father dealing with his wife’s dementia, Ed Helms as a sleazy investor to a gallery that Annie and Becky want to open, and brief cameos from Sharon Stone and Ashley Park. There are obvious echoes of Judd Apatow, with Rogen helping to amplify, but his finest films balanced so much and so well that one didn’t picture him plotting everything out with quite so much flashcards-on-a-corkboard precision.

The bigger laughs don’t always land (a failed date between Stone and Strathairn is a missed opportunity, while there are many unsuccessful poop jokes) but some of the smaller, more richly observed moments do, as Annie grapples with the shifting world around her and how your long-term friends changing their priorities shouldn’t affect your own. There is a scene at a baby shower when she finally reaches her limit with the smug cliches that come from the “you wouldn’t understand” type of mother that many non-parents will find incredibly satisfying to watch. It’s refreshing to see a film that isn’t afraid to comfort those who are often made to feel othered simply for not wanting children without feeling like an attack on those who do.

Kendrick delivers all of this with the passion of someone who has publicly said she also doesn’t want to have kids, and it’s one of her better comic modes, spiky but likable with it. Rogen is doing Rogen – but that’s rarely a bad thing – while Berlant, who can be extremely funny when taking on a specific comedy character, is a little lost in the film’s more dramatic moments. As Miller Rogen starts tying everything up, some scenes lacking in more detailed insight are somewhat saved by a final monologue, delivered as a response to the film’s eternal question. It’s clearly one that’s been extensively thought through by an understandably exhausted Miller Rogen – and it’s an intelligent, even-handed and genuinely rather moving way to end her film, a bumpy ride that truly sticks the landing. I pray no one asks her that question ever again.