In one of the first scenes of the new comedy Babes, free-spirited Eden (Ilana Glazer) gets down on her knees to peer at her best friend’s vagina. Pragmatic Dawn (Michelle Buteau) is going into labor, and Eden is trying to gauge how far along she is, to figure out whether they can continue to eat brunch, or they need to get Dawn to a hospital right away. It’s immediately clear that director Pamela Adlon is not holding back when it comes to the grosser details of pregnancy and childbirth, and using them to full comedic potential.
That scene also speaks to what the movie actually is: an honest look at the strain adulthood puts on friendships, especially as life tugs individuals along separate journeys. Eden and Dawn’s relationship feels authentic — their bathroom-routine updates, their full conversation where all they say is “Bitch!” in different tones, Eden immediately volunteering to buy Dawn sushi for her first post-birth meal. It made me nod along and think Ha ha, I’m like that with my best friends.
That also means that during their arguments with each other, I thought Oh no, I feel like that, too. I’ve never gotten mad because my friend showed my child The Omen, as Eden does with one of Dawn’s kids, prompting him to write demonic symbols all over his bedroom wall and scare off the new nanny. But I do get frustrated when weekend plans with my friends don’t align, because one of us has a standing commitment that the other just doesn’t understand. Adlon keeps Dawn and Eden’s frustrations grounded (albeit with some hilarious, over-the-top inciting incidents), so they never escalate to the point of destroying their friendship. That just makes their grievances resonate even more.
Image: Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
Eden and Dawn have been best friends since they were kids. Though Dawn is a married mother of two and Eden is single and living her best noncommittal life, they still make time for each other, even if that means Eden has a four-train journey across New York City if she wants to meet Dawn for their annual Thanksgiving tradition of watching a movie in a theater.
When Eden ends up pregnant from a one-night stand, she decides to keep the baby, much to everyone’s surprise. Dawn promises to support her. But Dawn has her own life to juggle, with her family, work, and marriage, and she can’t always be there when Eden needs her. And Eden admittedly needs her constantly for appointments and other pregnancy-related things, since she doesn’t have a lot of other meaningful relationships in her life, particularly not with other parents. The tension unearths buried frustrations; Eden doesn’t admit it at first, but she feels abandoned and betrayed that Dawn and her husband moved to Manhattan, away from where she and Dawn grew up in Astoria, Queens.
As someone who recently moved to a different borough from most of her friends, I felt that struggle so deeply. Instead of walking 10 minutes to meet up, now my friends and I need to find a middle point, or else commute via a stupid number of trains. (Seriously, why doesn’t the M train connect Queens and Brooklyn?!) I’m happy with my move; it was the right decision for me and my partner. Likewise, Dawn moved because living in a nice brownstone that could fit her entire family was the right choice for them.
Image: Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
But eventually, Eden confesses that she’s sad Dawn never considered her feelings when making the move. That moment made me confront a fact I’d been trying to ignore: I didn’t consider how far away I’d be from my closest friends when I moved, either, and I didn’t consider the toll it would take on my relationships. I insisted that overall, the move made sense because it’s what me and my partner wanted. Societally, we tend to accept that people will consult their spouses, immediate family, and their jobs when moving, and no one else. But with Babes, Adlon comes right out and says it: best friends get totally shafted in adulthood.
Sitcoms like Friends or How I Met Your Mother have a very rose-colored view of how friendship works for people in their 20s and 30s, in which people’s lives revolve around a tight-knit group of friends who somehow all have free schedules and live in the same neighborhood. But actual adulthood is busy! And you sometimes need to take four trains on a holiday weekend to get to a convenient meeting place. Your priorities start to shift, and they may not align with your friends’ priorities.
It’s a slow strain, but maybe one friend is starting a family, so they can’t afford New York City rent anymore; maybe another joined a club and their weekends are full of commitments; maybe another insists on staying in Bushwick, despite living in a tiny apartment (it’s rent-stabilized, though!) and outgrowing the hip nightlife scene. Those frequent weekend hangouts become more and more sparse, a fact you try to ignore because you love your friends so much, but one that eventually does alter your relationship.
Image: Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
Unlike in Bridesmaids, where tension escalates to a huge relationship-ending fight, Adlon take in Babes is that, most of the time, fighting with a best friend doesn’t mean totally cutting them out of your life. Even when Dawn and Eden argue — and their personal frustrations do escalate into pretty big blowouts — they never stop being friends or talking to each other. Usually, when friends fight in movies, it involves a big, dramatic declaration that the friendship is over, sometimes accompanied by an angsty life-without-each-other montage to really solidify that they aren’t talking. But in Babes, even after some arguments, Dawn and Eden still hang out, and are still friends.
Babes’ view of adulthood friendships isn’t idyllic, but it also isn’t overblown drama, in a way that’s easy to dismiss as heightened, unreal movie fiction. Having a fight with a friend that only sort of gets patched up as you continue to be in each other’s lives feels much more real, especially when that argument is built on beautifully realized tension, where neither side is wrong exactly, but neither of them are right, either. At its core, Babes is a love story between Eden and Dawn, two best friends who struggle to keep their friendship strong as adulthood threatens to pull them apart. Never once does Adlon lead us to doubt that these women mean a lot to each other.
It’s telling that this movie never veers into finding a romance for Eden as a way to fix her relationship with Dawn. Dawn is married and her husband is incredibly supportive, but Eden doesn’t magically find a similar partner who shows her the importance of family, or who reframes her friendship with Dawn as a secondary consideration. A lesser movie might have Eden realize that her new baby and possible new beau are her priorities now, and tell Dawn that she finally understands where Dawn is coming from. Instead, Adlon declares that friendships are just as important as family.
Society constantly prioritizes romantic relationships and the nuclear family over friendships, which we see over and over again in media. So to see a movie celebrate the importance of adult friendship, and have both friends reach a new, realistic understanding of how their relationship has evolved — but not disintegrated — is immensely satisfying. It’s an important perspective on friendship — one that often gets overlooked in a youth-focused cultural landscape, but that speaks to something a lot of us have experienced in some form, or will eventually experience, sooner than we might like.
Babes debuts in theaters on May 17.