Rating: *** ½
If you are a teenage girl looking forward to puberty, this charming adaptation of Judy Blume’s novel about growing up in the 1970, is a delightful treat,like stolen fudge from your mother’s fridge in the middle of the night.
The cute film addresses many problems of pubescence but ensures there is enough room in the storytelling for warmth and humour.
Indeed,there is something inherently benign in the treatment of puberty in this broadly illustrative drama. Director Kelly Fremon Craig makes sweetness a virtue rather than a sickness. A sunshiny radiance spreads across the storytelling as 11-year old Margaret Simon moves from New York to New Jersey.
The intermittent conversations with God serve as curious punctuation marks in a film that is as fragile in texture as it is blithe in mood. The thrusts at seriousness never upend the sense of benign fun and joy at the centre of the plot.
The ‘girlie’ factor,the initiation into sex talk and the giggly banter are beautifully adumbrated. They are neither overdone nor in-your-face. Much of the film feels so beautifully designed for Abby Ryder Fortson’s graceful performance as Margaret Simon. Forston is so pitch-perfect that I wondered if the Judy Blume wrote the character with her in mind.
Some of the other characters are painted in such broad strokes making them feel comicstrip-like. This, I feel is a deliberate ploy to create a simultaneous sense of immediacy and distance. Indeed Margaret’s problems are simultaneously relevant and stuff that fantasies are made of. She is at once an everygirl and a very special aspirational creation.
Beautifully designed and artfully told , Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret is a much smarter film than it seems to be .It will fill your heart with warm thoughts about an era gone by and still make you grateful that more things change the more they are the same.
