Kelly Fremon Craig films Judy Blume’s novel with patience and a cast who never talk down to a twelve-year-old. It is warmer and gentler than the book, and the grown-ups get the better story; that is a small complaint about a good film.
Judy Blume’s novel came out in 1970 and has been read under the covers ever since. Kelly Fremon Craig, who wrote and directed, has kept it in its own decade, and she has kept the book’s habit of treating a twelve-year-old’s worries as exactly as important as the twelve-year-old thinks they are. The result is warm, funny and carefully made, and we liked it a good deal. It is also gentler than the book, and the adults end up with the better story, which we suspect was not the plan.
Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) is eleven, nearly twelve, and living in New York when her parents announce a move to a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Her grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates) takes this as a personal injury. Her mother Barbara (Rachel McAdams) was raised Christian and her father Herb (Benny Safdie) is Jewish, and they have decided to raise her with no religion at all, so that when Margaret talks to God, as she does most nights, she is not sure who she is addressing. Within a day of arriving she is recruited by Nancy Wheeler (Elle Graham), the confident girl over the road, into a club of four whose business is bras, periods and boys.
Fortson is the reason the club scenes work. She plays Margaret as a girl who is watching everyone else for clues and is sure she is the only one without them, and she never asks to be found adorable. The bra-shopping scene, in a department store with McAdams and a saleswoman who has seen it all, is the funniest thing in the film, and we laughed out loud; then Fortson’s face in the mirror, wanting this and dreading it at once, took the laugh back. Elle Graham’s Nancy is a small tyrant played without malice, and Amari Alexis Price and Katherine Mallen Kupferer, as Janie and Gretchen, make the other two feel like girls who go on existing when Margaret is not looking.
McAdams gives the performance we kept thinking about afterwards. Barbara has moved to the suburbs to become the sort of mother she thinks she is supposed to be, and McAdams plays the effort: the committees, the bright voice on the doorstep, the moments alone in the kitchen when the voice drops. Kathy Bates plays Sylvia as a woman who regards New Jersey as a foreign country and her granddaughter as the only reason to cross the border. There is a scene between McAdams and Fortson in the second half, which we will not describe, that moved us more than a PG comedy about training bras had any right to. The two of them simply stop pretending for a minute, and nobody underlines it.
Tim Ives shoots the house and the school in soft daylight and the browns and mustards of the period, and keeps the camera at Margaret’s height often enough that the adults loom a little. Steve Saklad’s production design puts a great deal of wood veneer and shag carpet on screen and never winks at it. Ann Roth dresses Nancy in clothes that match and Margaret in clothes that nearly do, which tells you the friendship. Hans Zimmer wrote the music, and it is mostly quiet piano that stays out of the way, which is not what his name usually promises. Nick Moore and Oona Flaherty cut it to 106 minutes and are content to hold on a face while it decides what to feel.
The gentleness is the problem, where there is one. Blume’s Margaret can be petty and, on one occasion, cruel about a classmate the others have decided to despise. The film keeps the incident but hurries through it, and forgives Margaret before we have quite registered what she did. Her questions about God are asked with real seriousness and then answered with a hug. Barbara’s story, which Craig has expanded well beyond the book, has an adult sadness the children’s story cannot match, and there were stretches where we caught ourselves waiting for the mother to come back.
Craig’s previous film, The Edge of Seventeen, had a heroine who was rude and funny and hard to like, and it was better for it. This one is kinder and a little less sharp. Watch it with a daughter of about the right age, or with whoever lent you the book. The girls do their chest exercises with total conviction, and so, to its credit, does the film.
