Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
LionsgateKelly Fremon Craig’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret will not reinvent the wheel of coming-of-age movies. However, it gets the job done of delivering a fun, carefree, and delightful time at the movies. Adapting from Judy Blume’s book of the same name, the movie follows the tribulations of Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) as she moves from New York City to New Jersey with her parents (Benny Safdie & Rachel McAdams). From there, she will experience sixth grade with new friends as she enters a crucial period: adolescence.
While the movie is fun to watch, its filmmaking techniques are perhaps too conventional, which is fairly apparent during the movie’s telephone scenes. Throughout the movie, Margaret phones her grandmother (Kathy Bates) and has pleasant conversations. However, how it’s shot and edited makes it look like it’s plucked straight out of a bad ‘70s soap opera: Margaret calls her grandmother, and the movie cuts back to granny’s house. The phone rings, she gets up and goes, “Hello?” It may sound like the biggest nitpick in history. Still, the film keeps presenting a certain sense of pace and energy throughout rapidly cut montages of Margaret and her friends going to see the Radio City Rockettes or even Margaret and her grandmother going to see a show.
These montages add terrific amounts of energy to a movie brimming with positivity. The phone conversations grind that energy to a halt and make it feel like it belongs in a completely different film. The same can be said for the film's fairly paint-by-numbers chronological structure. Margaret’s tribulations are chronicled in painstaking detail from the end of the summer to the beginning of vacation the following year. Of course, when one adapts a popular book, one must respect the source material's continuity. However, when one adapts that book into a movie, where it has to be represented visually and aurally, does it need to feel so conventional? Someone can do so many things before the movie becomes predictable and follows coming-of-age tropes that have been beaten to death in better movies. Unfortunately, the latter half of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret utilizes all the tropes in the most clichéd fashion imaginable. It’s a shame because the film is an otherwise fun, albeit predictable, outlook on adolescence and how its protagonist perceives bodily changes from her internal perspective.
Ryder Fortson is simply terrific as Margaret. When she realizes that all of her friends are currently menstruating or that her crush has armpit hair, which she likely sees a kid her age having for the first time, it’s a lot to process, but she delivers all of her lines in spectacular fashion. One scene in particular, where Margaret and her friends see a perfectly formed Playboy model, is a riot. Earlier in the film, they learned an exercise to “increase their bust,” where they recite “I must, I must, I must increase my bust!” while moving their arms. After one character asks if they will look like the Playboy model when they turn 19, the girls all go up and say “We must, we must, we must increase our busts!” The whole theater laughed uncontrollably.
Rachel McAdams is also a major highlight of this movie as Barbara, Margaret’s mother. She shares incredible chemistry with an underused but effective Benny Safdie, Margaret’s father. Bates is also excellent in her limited scenes, even those damn phone scenes. She effectively conveys all the trials of being a mother to Margaret, who passed over from childhood to teenhood. She wants to be there for her, but Margaret grows increasingly distant from her mother after befriending someone who pressures her into being someone she’s not. Barbara tries to offer Margaret advice, but seeing her daughter grow distant in front of her eyes seems too much for her to bear, especially because she has joined a bunch of committees she isn’t enjoying.
McAdams plays her character perfectly and nails every aspect of her arc. At times, she’s extremely funny, but she’s also able to balance a more heartwarming side to her that audiences have rarely seen. This may be the best performance she’s ever given in a career filled with so many iconic roles. But it's the emotionally complex and multi-layered character that will make audiences remember how great of a performer she is.
It’s because of her, Forston, Bates, and Safdie that Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is worth watching. The movie may be the most conventional coming-of-age tale of the year. Still, it also contains some incredible performances, mainly from McAdams, who delivers the best turn of her career so far. She’s never been as good as this, and it will be hard for her to top this role in a career filled with versatility. If the film had better technical craft going for it, it would’ve been a masterpiece, but alas. It’s still great to see a movie filled with so much joy on the big screen, which should convince enough people to want to see it.