Review: Obvious Child

City Paper grade: B

As statements of purpose go, it’s hard to beat the one that opens Gillian Robespierre’s first feature, where comedian Jenny Slate regales an audience with a standup routine about vaginal secretions. But where a movie like 22 Jump Street marshals gross-out humor for its own sake, Robespierre’s simply marking out her territory: This is a movie about what goes on down there; those with fragile sensibility need not apply. Slate’s Donna is a go-nowhere protagonist whose already-tenuous existence is wobbling as she approaches 30 — in other words, much like the heroes and heroines of half the movies at Sundance, where Obvious Child premiered. But the movie is uncharacteristically frank about Donna’s situation, especially when she accidentally gets pregnant during a one-night stand and quickly decides to have an abortion — too quickly, in fact: She has to wait two weeks until the fetus is far enough along to abort. It’s less an achievement of the film’s than a sad commentary on the culture surrounding it that this is even remotely notable, and to her credit, Robespierre doesn’t treat Donna’s decision as a wrenching dilemma: She’s single, semi-employed and practically bankrupt; what else would (or should) she do? But if Donna’s choice is an easy one, it doesn’t make much sense to use it to frame the film as a whole, which therefore lacks much in the way of dramatic tension or anything beyond low-grade moping around. Robespierre wants to steer clear of off-the-shelf self-actualization, but she doesn’t replace it with anything. Fortunately, Slate, who had a brief and unremarkable tenure on Saturday Night Live, proves a winning companion; it’s a hang-out movie, and she’s fun to hang out with.