I could start off by saying that this is the sweetest romantic comedy about abortion I can imagine, and that’s probably true. That said, it basically is a romantic comedy about abortion, and that’s not a subject I particularly enjoy in films.
The “obvious child” of the title is not really the baby being aborted, who’s barely acknowledged at all, but the 27-year-old Donna Stern (Jenny Slate), a girl in New York City working in a progressive bookstore and doing stand up comedy in the evenings. The film opens on one of her routines, and it’s an awkward but decently funny brand of self-deprecating humor. We’ll see a few more as the film goes on and they parallel her changes in self-confidence as she’s first dumped by her boyfriend (a particularly terrible self-pitying routine) and then as she regains confidence through the growing up that pregnancy has forced her to do – even though she decides to end that pregnancy and doesn’t waver.
