#WrightWatch: Obvious Child
I have anxiety. I think it gets triggered when I watch characters do things that are apparently self-destructive in movies…or maybe when I watch characters step out far beyond their safe zones. Such sights create aversion in me, just a pure need to stop and get away and just no, no, no, no.
Of course, I do my best to continue on anyway. Oftentimes, if a story can take me to that place of total no then it’s usually being told well enough that the ending will be worth seeing.
The ending of Obvious Child was definitely worth seeing.
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The whole movie was definitely worth seeing. I’ve been wanting to write more funnily of late, so I found a comedy like this, which is not situation-based or character-based but is funny because the actual sentences people say are funny (“everything you’re saying is valid, but also, you’re scaring my dick off”), instructive. This is the form of comedy I want to emulate. Though I would not be stupid enough to attempt to include stand-up in my writing, and I think the fact that Obvious Child does successfully incorporate stand-up comedy and even more amazingly the feel of stand-up comedy (that combination of intimacy and distant performance you only get when in a small room with someone doing a job, but whose job is telling you about their lives in the kind of detail usually reserved only for friends) into its (best) scenes is indicative of how excellent it is.
Also, I loved the relationships between Donna (Jenny Slate) and her divorced parents (played by Polly Draper and, a favourite of mine, Richard Kind). There’s a cut from a scene where Donna is eating silently with her dad to a scene where Donna is eating silently with her mum that tells us everything, wordlessly, about the difference in those relationships through the contrast of tones alone (kudos editor Casey Brooks — kudos).
Indeed the film’s heart, its warmth (this is a very warm film) rests in the relationships it charts, which are by and large supportive.
But I don’t want to think on that warmth alone. I want to think about the moments when Donna throws herself out of her safety zone, which, unsurprisingly, she often does on stage (possibly the least safe space in Western society). Those moments of no. Because I think the beauty of Obvious Child lies in that absence of safety. I want to push my own characters out to that point.
Maybe then I can follow them there.
