(IMAGE: HBO Max)
HBO Max. 2021. Comedy/Biography. 83 minutes.
RATING: 1.5 out of 4
In the pantheon of sympathetic protagonist careers, “workaholic Hollywood agent” has to rank somewhere slightly above “televangelist” and below “crack whore.” So Single Mother by Choice has that going against it from the very start, considering that the lead character, Selina Ringel’s Eva, gets most of the screen time. And that’s partly by design – the film’s arc is one where all her security blankets will gradually be stripped away, forcing her to be vulnerable and accept that she can’t have it all without some help. But it also makes the first part of the movie much harder to relate to. Eva isn’t a charismatic asshole like some Nicolas Cage character; she’s just the sort of person that people like me who live in Los Angeles try to avoid as much as possible. Conversations with agents even at the best of times tend to be necessary, annoying, and short. With a runtime of 83 minutes, Single Mother by Choice gets two out of the three.
The central gimmick of the film is that Ringel was actually pregnant during filming, and she and husband Dan Levy Dagerman conceived the project as a way to make an authentic film about the process. The 13 minute making-of featurette that airs, alongside the feature, on HBO Max, documents this process, and reveals that perhaps it should have been the main event instead. Ringel bickering with her husband while having hormonal surges is funny. Ringel playing a control freak who wants a baby all by herself is unlikable.
Of course, during the process, COVID happened, necessitating a total rewrite of the script to be more about having a baby under lockdown. Fact and fiction are deliberately blurred, beginning with what appears to be footage of Ringel’s face during her actual miscarriage. That may sound like a spoiler, and I thought it was, too, but it turns out that was the prior pregnancy, not a peek at the ending.
Still, the blurring of lines makes it feel like towards the end of the movie, Eva gets more sympathetic because we’re seeing the real Ringel react in real time to world events affecting both the shoot and her own pregnancy. Maybe she’s just that good an actress that she can alter our sympathies that way. Or, by being real in front of the camera when she wasn’t before, she inadvertently went method.
As director, Dagerman seems torn on how best to shoot the thing. Mostly handheld, the movie sometimes veers into diagetic faux-phone screens and Zooms, but most of the time still treats the camera as ominpotent and invisible, even as it’s shooting everything like a documentary. An all-screens or found-footage gimmick seems like something possibly attempted and then dropped. There are certainly plenty of precedents for use of handheld in mumblecore-ish movies, but Greta Gerwig, Ringel is not. She does a lot more nude scenes, though. Considering the subject matter, the navel-gazing on display is primarily literal.
How this got on HBO Max seems a bigger question. The streamer has been quietly acquiring many smaller festival films, like Talia Lugacy’s excellent This Is Not a War Story. Single Mother by Choice may be on the same budget level, but it’s not remotely playing the same artistic game. In the before-times, it might have played a Laemmle theater for a week.
Still, it’s impossible to dismiss the movie entirely. There’s something bold in the attempt to craft a fictional narrative around an actual pregnancy. Dagerman just didn’t quite find it – everything that does work in the final project seems to be a result of the pregnancy itself rather than any creative choices. When the 13 minute making-of offers better characters, drama and comedy than the actual product, something clearly needs adjusting. Removing the fiction factor from the equation might be the secret to combining their primary talents next time.
###