My hands were shaking as I left the theater. Obvious Child is not traumatic, exactly, it’s just so real. There’s even a line about “old men in black robes.” You already know the story. What you don’t know — can’t know — until you see the film is that the story is just a frame upon which to hang a remarkable set of truths, some painful, some still painfully true, some funny and touching and surprising.
At first I wasn’t even sure I liked our heroine, Donna. She was careless and immature (but also lovable and self-deprecating) and — funny. Of course in some ways she had to be. These circumstances can’t be picture-book or the movie is propaganda instead of the affecting work of filmmaking that it is.
I am closer to her parents’ age than to hers, so the role that they, particularly her mother (SPOILER ALERT) played was especially moving, as she told her “kitchen table abortion” story and, when it counted, flattened the wall that had kept mother and daughter apart for so long. It was a stark reminder not only of the realities that all women share, but also of what women my age knew to be true when we were young: termination of an unintended pregnancy was a risk to our lives. A risk many of us fear has returned.
Right now, today, we face assaults on all sides: contraception, equal pay, voting rights, civil rights and of course, abortion. The quiet, sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly sad, journey through this film evokes grief over the threats we know are emerging with more and more power. It’s one woman’s story from one wild night to shock to truly loving families and friends who can’t quite compensate for the crisis to the inevitably sad, lonely moment as the procedure unfolds to the life that lies ahead.
The difference, the reason Obvious Child is so much more than “that abortion movie” is that it offers characters we come to love, a crisis we all recognize, a family clearly a product of the open child rearing that many of us chose over the stratified parenting we experienced as well as loving, truth-telling, strong friends and fully-developed principal characters with depth and, under all that irreverent Millennial camouflage, deep sensitivity and honor.