Film Review: CHERRY: Pregnancy Dramedy Wants to Be Bittersweet But is Ultimately Bland [Tribeca 2022]

Cherry Review

Cherry (2022) Film Review from the 21st Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Sophie Galibert, starring Alex Trewhitt, Hannah Alline, Angela Nicholas, Sandy Duarte, Wendy Hammers, Darius Levanté, Dan Schultz, Melinda DeKay, Charlie S. Jensen, Samantha Barrios, Alice Bang, Joe Sachem, and Jericko Espinosa.

Seeing as this country is built on a foundation of misogyny and sexism it’s never been a great time for the bodily autonomy of birthing people in America. Last month’s leaked Supreme Court notes only reinforced such a notion as they catapulted our dialogue on the topic back to the cultural forefront with a ferocious splat. But rest assured that it’s not just what people do with their bodies but rather the very bodies themselves that are still contentious conversation grounds for a zeitgeist that still functions under the sway of patriarchal disgust.

As such, it’s necessary to have cinematic narratives that talk frankly about conception, pregnancy, childrearing, and abortion to accurately depict the sheer difficulty it takes some women to talk about their life choices within even their closest circles. If that happens frequently enough, then perhaps those discussions will become normalized and, conversely, we’ll be able to talk about them more easily beyond our screens, without being skeeved out by social taboos.

It’s with this in mind that Cherry, the feature debut from director and co-writer Sophie Galibert, should be viewed and even thematically lauded, as we follow the titular character in her weekend-long struggle over whether to keep an unplanned pregnancy. And it’s with that in mind that one might be able to forgive the film’s rough patches and cliché-laden script.

While Cherry might evoke Juno and Unpregnant comparisons with its spitfire nerd-girl vibes, its teetering on the border of MPDG-meets-mumblecore certainly undermines that popular indie coolness. Cherry, played by Alex Trewhitt, stumbles and skates her way through her lo-fi L.A. life of twentysomething burnout. Unfortunately, Galibert and her co-writer Arthur Cohen keep her distanced from us with their awkward comedic timing and generally strange emotional pacing.

After getting fired from her gig at the magic shop for terminal tardiness (and some balloon-making with unintentionally phallic consequences) Cherry lies her way into an urgent care center to confirm that she is indeed pregnant – much to the chagrin of the overworked and coincidentally very pregnant doctor (Sandy Duarte), who just wants to go home. From there, she darts around Los Angeles in her beamer BMW to break the news in-person to her boyfriend Nick (Dan Schultz), as he hasn’t been picking up his phone. On the way, she crashes a quinceñera where her former roller derby team is performing to beg the captain (Alice Bang) for her spot back for some guaranteed income.

These later tasks prove difficult for Cherry because she can’t bring herself to break the news of her pregnancy to anyone else. The dragging-out of these awkward and forced moments are the result of Cherry’s own anxious and non-confrontational self, as she doesn’t want to admit (or possibly can’t even admit) this life-changing development. Her fumbling and diverting that contributes quite a bit to the film’s ad-libbed aimlessness are suddenly thrown into a clearer context, giving the film some sudden emotional weight.

But that earnestness is undermined with the stagey, almost farcical tone that the film maintains otherwise, particularly with a second-act dinner scene at Cherry’s mother’s house that feels like its own separate comedy sketch. It doesn’t help that too many of the line deliveries come off like regurgitated social media talking points rather than actual dialogue (or even worse, since the denouement evokes a sort of after-school special blatancy), which in turn cheapens whatever messages the film is trying to say about destructive male ignorance and adulthood’s daunting nature (the latter of which was more successfully argued in Kit Zauhar’s Actual People from last year). All of this only draws our attention to the film’s budgetary and technical limitations while drawing us further out of investment in Cherry’s own story.

That admittedly sounds terrible to say, as Cherry’s is a story worth telling over a topic that should’ve long been destigmatized. But with such a disjointed presentation, it only ever broaches a feeling of forgettable indie twee. But maybe if pregnancy and abortion are getting that sort of cinematic treatment then that means those topics have already been normalized within the American psyche … just not with the urgency that one would’ve hoped.

Rating: 5/10

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