Director: Eva Victor
Writer: Eva Victor
Stars: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Louis Cancelmi
Synopsis: Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on – for everyone around her, at least.
Sorry, Baby is told in four chapters (plus an epilogue), but everything wrong with this self-congratulatory feature debut from writer-director-lead Eva Victor can be summed up in just three scenes.
Nestled in the autumnal, mahoganied milieu of New England academia, the film follows an English grad who’s been spiraling ever since completing her thesis. Though her career is on a promising track—she spends afternoons teaching the great novels of the 20th century (most prominently “Lolita”) at her alma mater, where she’s just become the youngest faculty member to ever obtain full-time status—Agnes (Victor) is still spinning in the orbit of the Bad Thing that’s swallowed her so completely she can barely envision a future. Asked whether she wants to someday raise a family, she responds that though her friends and classmates are all moving down adulthood’s list of milestones, she can’t quite picture being a grown-up. “Like Humbert’s desire to freeze Lolita in time,” trauma is both persistent and paralytic. That’s the sort of cutesy cross-text connection that might score props from Agnes’ students, but if you were catching yourself in an eye-roll just now, you’re already more discerning than Victor’s idea of the average media consumer (or at least one who attends a private liberal arts school in rural Massachusetts).
The script’s unpolished dialogue aspires to naturalism but betrays itself with interjections of awkward, overly theatrical humor. The first signs of artifice appear almost immediately: Agnes’ best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), is visiting her in the house they shared during grad school and, on a stroll through the park, exclaims to a friendly stranger that she’s a happily liberated lesbian. Just as Lydie is given a set of sociopolitical credentials instead of a personality, Victor coasts on her subject’s progressive laurels rather than develop a creative voice. The gap in our culture left by the departure of Lena Dunham’s Girls has never seemed so large.
The film celebrates its aversion to interactions that aren’t layered in euphemisms when Lydie accompanies Agnes to an appointment with a conveniently callous doctor. The scene blunders along as the two flag his tone and words which include but aren’t limited to ‘attacker’ and ‘cervix culture’ (cue audience applause). Funnily enough, Agnes herself is subject to the same kind of linguistic micromanagement in the very next scene by HR types with a shared enthusiasm for prevarication, but whether Victor recognizes the irony is unclear. Sorry, Baby is so pedantically attuned to the “correct” way of speaking about its protagonist’s trauma that it forgets to actually say anything. Whenever her screenplay vaguely approximates a human conversation, Victor can’t help but reduce everyone around Agnes to broad caricatures of societal apathy, a tendency doubled down on during an embarrassingly wooden classroom exchange about the merit of style.
The student she props up like a puppet so Agnes can deliver a point is unsure how to feel about a perspective as vile as Humbert’s finding such beautiful expression in Nabokov’s immaculate prose: “I really hated the stuff happening, but I really liked the sort of stuff he way saying…so I was pissed.” The film’s own interest in the book doesn’t run much deeper. But maybe Victor deserves the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the emphasis on “Lolita” in combination with a typeface unmistakably borrowed from Woody Allen signals a reclamation of sorts; perhaps Natasha (Kelly McCormack), the former classmate and current colleague that’s never liked Agnes, is the Quilty to her Humbert, a bizarro-verse projection of whom Agnes might’ve become had the Bad Thing made her as bitter and condescending as Victor seems to be herself. By crudely characterizing everyone around Agnes, Victor appears bold for lifting bullet points from a community center brochure, but in so patronizingly viewing the general public, she mistakes conformity for transgressive reeducation.
Her depiction of the assault (one of the rare moments in which she displays any kind of faith in her audience) is both tasteful and thematically resonant. Rather than needlessly verify what takes place, Victor removes us from Agnes’ perspective with a series of match cuts as day unfeelingly turns to night.
Insofar as it tries to emulate Noah Baumbach, the film is a success: Nothing this synthetic has passed for sincerity since 2019’s Marriage Story (Sorry, Baby is thankfully less insufferable). Once John Carroll Lynch’s good samaritan appears bearing a Good Sandwich—the sandwich is made with pricey Calabrian chili, but the side of wisdom is all processed ham—the movie drops any remaining pretense to naturalism. Cloaked in vintage fall fabrics and the respectability of its Oberlin-grade feminism, Sorry, Baby swaps insight for twee humor while patting itself on the back of a Merino wool sweater. No wonder the film was such a hit at Sundance. The aforementioned classroom discussion asks whether great art can be abhorrent. Sorry, Baby leaves that ancient question open-ended but proves it certainly isn’t made from good intentions alone.
