Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

Shopping for training bras: Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson

After too many sequels, comic book adaptations, and product advertisements disguised as films, Kelly Fremon Craig's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. is the kind of flick that restores my faith in the American film industry. I should not be too surprised, The Edge of Seventeen, KFC's debut, was not exactly chopped chopped liver and I have some respect for Judy Blume, author of the source novel. As a child, I only read Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, probably because it had a male protagonist.

Eleven year old Margaret Simon is the protagonist of the movie. She has a number of anxieties and rites of passage awaiting her. Her father's promotion has enabled her family to move to a bigger house, sending Margaret to a new school and necessitating her to find a new peer group. She come from a mixed marriage, as they used to say. Her father (Benny Safdie) is Jewish and her mother (Rachel McAdams), a gentile. They have chosen to raise their child without religion and this generates a good deal of rancor among the surviving grandparents. Despite all this, Margaret addresses her prayers to a divine power and undergoes a genuine spiritual quest. However, Margaret's biggest anxiety concerns her burgeoning sexuality. The movie's arc is shaped around Margaret and her chums having their first periods. 

I belabor the work's themes mostly to stress that they are there. Blume balances the anxieties her protagonist faces with social observations and gentle humor. The author is as attuned to the subtle gradations of class as Jane Austen and George Eliot. Now the juvenile fiction format doesn't offer Blume too large a canvas, there is no Middlemarch in her oeuvre, but she holds her own as a quirky realist. It appears that KFC, like her co-adapter James L. Brooks, is also a quirky realist and that material and director are well matched. ...Margaret is a spritely paced adaptation that retains the original's satisfying structure.

Rarely has a director gotten so many good performances from actresses playing preteens. Most Hollywood films depict eleven year olds as flat chested sixteen year olds. Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and her young cohorts all capture the awkwardness of girls facing puberty with anticipation and dread. The acknowledgement of such ambivalence is a milepost in psychological development. Happily, Margaret has two loving parents able to give her guidance on her journey. Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie winningly portray imperfect paragons. The only quibble I had was in not finding Kathy Bates to be a believable Jew.

Some may find the US suburbia circa 1970 portrayed in ...Margaret to be a neverland, but I think that is part of the point. I once asked my mother-in-law what she remembered of the tumult of the Sixties and she replied that she was too busy raising children to take much notice. Most of the turmoil of the Sixties was based in cities and college towns. Life largely went on as usual in rural America and the suburbs and ...Margaret captures the Americana of wiener roasts, lemonade stands, and running through the sprinklers. The polarization of the USA, then and now, largely reflects the divide between urban and rural, just like in France in 1789. However, the revolution would not be televised in 1970. The silent majority of the burbs and the sticks had been responsible for the Thermidorian reaction of Nixon's election.

From the first chords of Paul Revere and the Raiders version of "Shake a Tail Feather", Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret gives us a vivid recreation of the sounds and sights of 1970 without resorting to cliché. Unfortunately, home décor was overly brown then. Nevertheless, ..Margaret is a future classic of female adolescence, up there with Clarence Brown's National Velvet. Check it out and liberate this film from its chick flick ghetto.