A movie about romance, comedy and abortion, yes-abortion-. I didn't know what to expect of it, how do you add those 2 genres together with abortion? In obvious Child you can. Directed by Gillian Robespierre in her directorial debut, the movie was premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2014.
Donna (Jenny Slate) is a young woman in her 20's , she works at a bookstore to pay the bills but her real dream job is making stand up comedy at a local club. Her boyfriend breaks up with her leaving her devastated. As many people dealing with a breakup, she decided to go out with friends and get drunk, just to forget this sour moment. That night she meets a guy and how it's expected, they end up having drunk sex.
Living the day by day but still having her own priorities and dreams,Donna knows she should be thinking on a "serious lifestyle". Behind the farts jokes, you can see that she is a mature young person. She wants and needs to have plans for her life but things don't go the way she wants. She soon realizes she is pregnant. Like many other unwed, not engaged and single women (soon to be jobless) she freaks out and try to keep the secret to herself but she can't do it. She ask for an advice to her friend and her mother but soon realizes she needs to be honest to herself: she can't have the baby and she doesn't know if she should tell Max (Jake Lacy), the father.
Basically the whole movie put us in Donna's point of view, we have to be in her shoes and actually ask ourselves: ¿What would I do?. Many Pro-life activists have crucified this movie (and other like this one) because they say this movie is propaganda from Pro-Choice...... or pro-abortion as they call us, advocacy groups,etc. They criticize Obvious Child saying that the story, the abortion itself is too sugar coated, impossible and fake. They think that Donna doesn't encounter challenges and the abortion was really easy and no harm was done to no one. It really blows my mind when Pro-Life people thinks the Choice is easy and painless, it never is. This Pro-life critics don't have any idea of what is going thru a women's life and mind.
I never went through an abortion and none of my closest friends have got one, AS FAR AS I KNOW. The reality is that even if you are not surrounded by people who went through an abortion, it doesn't mean that it doesn't happens more often than you think to a specific demographic: Women. That's why I was very pleased to see a woman's name as the director of this film.
Taking a big risk, Donna finally tells Max about the baby and what she plans to do. Max's posture about it is, againg, Obvious; Nothing. As a young man who did not have any plans to have a baby he lets Donna take the choice for them. What is worth saying is that Max was decent enough to stay with Donna at a moment where neither of them dreamed to be in. He doesn't say much, but he supports her choice. He doesn't express an opinion about it because he is not ready. He respects Donna's choice because he knows he would have done the same if he were in the same situation.
Obvious Child is just honest, there are young women out there who take this hard decision sometimes alone and sometimes with support. Some of them will be depress, some will talk to a best friend, some will confess to their mothers, some will need the approval of a man to do it and 47,000 women will die each year. So... abortion is an easy and harmless choice? No.
By taking this desperate choice, Donna closes her -childish- chapter. Without knowing, she has changed forever.
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