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If you could break down the documentary form to a simple formula, it might read something like “Time + Access.” Those are the advantages enjoyed by Alyse Walsh and Jackie Jesko’s “Baby/Girls,” which diligently unearths tales of teen pregnancy in rural Arkansas after the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. Across two years and multiple subjects in a Christian maternity home, it casts a spotlight on both cultural and personal complications that, despite the film’s meandering focus, make for stirring dramatic topics at the outset — if you can ignore its occasional use of garish generative AI.
Following new mothers and pregnant teenagers, some as young as 14, “Baby/Girls” charts the fragile dynamic between cultural taboos and teenage pregnancy. All the while, its apparent north star is the idea that its subjects are, first and foremost, children, a fact of which we’re reminded through their playful, often naïve interactions. The camera, while keenly observant, maintains a mannered distance within the confines of Compassion House, a caring facility where some teens are sent by their families, and others are ordered by local courts while strapped with ankle monitors too large for their legs. Walsh and Jesko seldom turn their attention away from their young subjects, but they allow them the room and liberty to speak, and to express not only what they feel, but the many things they do not know (or wish they would have known), including and especially that adequate sex education that might have helped them make different decisions.
To say that “Baby/Girls” is a pro-choice documentary is almost politically reductive, at least in the binary sense the phrase is often deployed. None of the young girls or the women running the home (some former teen moms themselves) seem to have wished they could have had abortions. But within minutes of letting them speak to the camera, it becomes clear how severely limiting their circumstances have been, robbing them of the choices to determine their own paths. These are stories not just of lacking contraception, but of cycles of poverty and neglect. Some subjects want to be mothers, other don’t, and some eventually experience the intense post-partum depression that can come with wanting to live a normal teenage life while having to care for a newborn. Each story is rendered in lifelike hues, with the sunlight and widespread rural greenery offering a sense of secret possibility where none might truly exist, like some kind of hope far off in the distance. However, the more we learn about each subject, and the more they face the reality of the world, this begins to seem like an impossible wish.
However, while singular moments are presented with clarity, the film often squanders its emotional momentum. The story, at a distance, features the utmost potential for emotional intensity, but the closer the filmmakers get to weaving an overarching tapestry, the more the individual stories run together in terms of tone and spirit. Despite running a mere 94 minutes, the film’s multiple threads are presented in a manner so outstretched their totality becomes dulled, as the inherent allure of the saga at large gradually wanes in energy. These are, at their core, deeply moving stories of women made to suffer quietly across multiple generations, thanks to a cultural war that was lost long before the Dobbs decision; the adults who explain this to the camera have lucid political outlooks, just as the movie does. But beyond its initial introductions to each subject, “Baby/Girls” rarely probes its own purview, or allows its perspective (or that of its subjects) to evolve in meaningful ways as time goes back. Rarely is the footage cut together in a way that creates a meaningful arc for the audience. Perhaps the directors’ unobtrusive approach to interviewing — while ethically forthright — is what prevents the film from being too dramatically rigorous, and its subjects from introspecting too heavily.
There’s one exception to be found, in a teenage subject, Grace, who seems excited to be a mom until the financial and emotional realities of motherhood come crashing down on her. However, when she arrives at this hurdle, the movie tends to cut away from her, and instead tries to locate its drama elsewhere, as if in an attempt to mechanically switch around moments of interest nabbed from other subplots. As the girls leave Compassion House and resume their lives, it’s as though the movie can’t keep up with them, so it struggles to bring its narrative home.
It certainly doesn’t help that the natural beauty of these images — the melancholy of vibrant teens forced into difficult circumstances, and the adorable babies we meet, who are genuinely loved — finds itself punctuated by digital ugliness. The film employs photographs of subjects’ friends and families to sketch the contours of their lives, but these are touched up with generative A.I. tools, which give the people in them macabre, warped features in bizarre and obvious ways.
It’s hard to tell the degree to which these images are even real; if the documentary form is cinema at its most truthful, then this is an unnecessary corruption of reality, one that fractures the trust between audience and storyteller, such as when the Netflix true crime documentary “What Jessica Did” was found to contain AI generated photographs. As aesthetic flourishes go, this is not the key defining feature of “Baby/Girls,” but for a film with such weight and immediacy surrounding the personal and political, it’s a strange shot in the foot. Capturing these subjects in so delicate a manner is vital in an age of encroaching theocracy, but a film that both takes ethical shortcuts and bypasses vital third-act reflections (yielding a number of rushed emotional conclusions) is unlikely to make a lasting impact. That these subjects are placed before a camera is certainly important, but that’s only the first step to ensuring their stories are told, and preserved, with the requisite care. Time and access may be vital components, but filmmaking is more than a math equation.
English (US) ·