Critics reviews

...Obvious Child boldly flips the script, at times confronting the audience with the extent of its lead's insecurities and self-sabotaging tendencies. While lesser actors would be lost in a sea of quirks, Jenny Slate consistently integrating her character's idiosyncrasies into a complex portrait of twentysomething maturation.

Obvious Child was far more complex [than other recent stories about white female New Yorkers in their twenties], and her story was pretty relatable to me—but that's probably because I've lived what she's lived... I didn't have a choice—I couldn't keep [my baby], no matter how much I wanted to. I think that lack of choice was something really well articulated in Obvious Child. Donna doesn't think twice, which is really relatable as a woman who had been in _that_ place.

As far as filmmaking and storytelling goes, there is no denying the fact that Obvious Child is important—vital, even. Not only is there the refreshing subversion of rom-com conventions, but obviously there is Donna's (Jenny Slate) ultimate decision to get an abortion. But the real revolution for me was not merely in her "right to choose," but her right to have complex and often contradictory feelings about that choice, with no judgment and no after-school-special melodrama.

Trouble is, they just don't have that much material, and their struggle to get this flimsy, rudderless movie to feature length is apparent in many scenes (like the one featuring David Cross as a friend of Donna's who belatedly tries to put the moves on her) that feel like filler. Slate, however, is a marvel, equally adept with gleeful vulgarity and understated pathos. Obvious Child is a movie to see just so that you can say that you saw her when.

Nobody's going to confuse Gillian Robespierre's likable rom-com "Obvious Child" with the best of Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch, but for many women who see it – and quite a few men too – it will instantly become a landmark moment in cultural history. "Obvious Child" is often scabrously funny in a post-Lena Dunham, post-Woody Allen New York comedy vein...

Leavened by an attractive soundtrack that includes the Carter Family's well-placed "Single Girl, Married Girl" (and the Paul Simon song that gives the film its title), Obvious Child has a loud agenda that will be off-putting to some. Still, it's a welcome counterpoint to the likes of Knocked Up and even Juno, where the abortion route is an apparent no-go. And despite its controversial topic, it manages to be desperately romantic—maybe the biggest shock of all.

The director and screenwriter, Gillian Robespierre, brings no substance to the chitchat and no complexity to the characters, the plot, the issues, the New York settings, or the images. Even the engagingly idiosyncratic Gaby Hoffmann, as Donna's best friend, is limited to an amiable blandness. The entire production exudes self-congratulatory complacency with its blue-state high-fiving.

Obvious Child is equal parts a comedy about a young woman struggling on the periphery of show business (akin to last year's In a World…) and a sensitive study of oddball Brooklynites facing trials alone... Though at times it feels like one of those movies where everyone in Brooklyn knows each other, and where Donna's support network consists of stock characters (sassy gay friend, feminist pal prone to diatribes), the sitcom glibness is counterpoised by the expertise of the character actors.

Obvious Child hits more often than it misses, but it does miss, sometimes conspicuously: Nellie goes on an anti-Max screed that serves no apparent purpose except to inject some explicit feminism into the film's dialogue, and even the character concedes she's beside the point. But as a study in the clash of spoonfed immaturity and frigid reality, it signals clear-eyed compassion...