Kelly Fremon Craig (2023)
Although the title rang a faint bell, I had no idea about the source material’s reputation until I saw the film’s trailer. ‘For over 50 years,’ this announces, ‘one iconic book has connected generations – now it’s finally coming to the big screen’. Hype, of course, but it’s clear from Wikipedia that Judy Blume’s novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., first published in 1970, has continued to mean a great deal to a great many Americans. (Categorised, nowadays anyway, as a ‘middle grade’ novel, it has evidently been enjoyed by older readers, too.) The long wait for the movie version, also according to Wikipedia, is down to Blume herself, who ‘rejected several offers to adapt her book’ before selling the film rights, in 2020, to James L Brooks and Kelly Fremon Craig. Brooks, now in his eighties, is best known as the writer-director of middle-of-the-road Oscar winners Terms of Endearment (1983) and As Good as It Gets (1997). Fremon Craig has recent form in coming-of-age dramedy: she wrote and directed The Edge of Seventeen (2016). Along with them and others, Judy Blume is a producer of the film, which she has said (in a TV interview available on YouTube) is better than her novel. And the screen version of Are You There does have plenty going for it, especially the performances.
The narrative covers a year – from 1970 to 1971, one annual summer camp to the next – in the life of Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson), during which she turns twelve. Returning from camp to her New York City home at the start, Margaret, an only child, is dismayed to learn that she and her parents, Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb (Benny Safdie), are moving imminently to New Jersey (because of her father’s promotion at work). Margaret’s paternal grandmother, Sylvia (Kathy Bates), whom she adores and who adores her in return, is even more dismayed. But Margaret soon settles down in her new environment, making friends with three neighbours and/or schoolmates – Nancy (Elle Graham), Jamie (Amari Alexis Price) and Gretchen (Katherine Kupferer). Neither Barbara, a WASP, nor Herb, who’s Jewish, practises their religion; they take the view that Margaret should decide her own religious identity when she feels old enough. At junior high school, her class teacher (Echo Kellum) sets Margaret a year-long assignment to explore different religions. On a visit to New York, she asks to accompany Sylvia to a synagogue. Back in New Jersey, Margaret goes to a Christian service at the church which her Black friend Jamie’s family regularly attend, and to a Christmas mass with Nancy. Margaret isn’t sure which of these she prefers (and if she explores beyond Judaism and Christianity I missed it). She prays regularly, though, always opening with, ‘Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret’.
That twee form of words epitomises the dual challenge faced by Kelly Fremon Craig – of making Margaret appealing but not cutesy, and her religious musings matter to a 2020s audience. The first part of the challenge is certainly met. Abby Ryder Fortson, actually thirteen when Are You There was made, has quite a bit of film and TV experience (though I’ve not seen her before). As Margaret, she comes over as a sensitive and mature, rather than precocious, performer. She’s more than able to express her character’s innocent delight and excitement in response to amusing happenings and nice surprises yet there’s also a solemn quality in Ryder Fortson’s face that somehow foresees the lineaments of the adult Margaret. The other half of the challenge is more of a problem. Fifty years on, religion’s centrality in the mind of a pre-teen girl feels quaint (albeit the parents of the pre-teen in question aren’t religious and quaintness may be less an issue in the US than on this side of the Atlantic). What’s more, Fremon Craig seems uneasy with it. Margaret and her three friends are also preoccupied with boys and with their own bodies – their chest measurements and, especially, when they’ll start menstruating. It’s clear from Wikipedia and from what Judy Blume says on YouTube that this is an important element of the book too (and of what made it controversial in 1970) but in the film it has an awkward relationship with the religious aspect. Illustrating the traumatic comedy of puberty, Fremon Craig is often cooking with gas but she keeps the religious aspect on a low light: Margaret appears to pray to God purely in the hope of His expediting her first period – which, she believes, will prove that she’s ‘normal’.
When religious issues do eventually come to the fore they badly interrupt the film’s rhythm and throw Are You There off balance. Margaret has never met her maternal grandparents, who live in Ohio and from whom her mother is estranged: we don’t at first know why, though when Barbara feels compelled to break with recent custom and send them a Christmas card we can be pretty sure the impulsive act will have consequences, and it sure does. Widowed Sylvia, now feeling isolated in New York, spends the winter and early spring in Florida. Margaret’s twelfth birthday present from her parents is a return plane ticket to spend a few days with her grandmother there. Then, months after Barbara’s Christmas card, her mother and father reply: they describe the card as an answer to their prayers and invite themselves to Barbara and Herb’s in a few days’ time, while they’re on a trip ‘out East’. Barbara breaks the news to Herb one evening just before Margaret returns from school: now we learn that Barbara’s pious parents, because she was marrying a Jew, ‘cast out’ their daughter and informed her she’d go to Hell. Arriving home to be told by her tearful mother that the Florida trip is off, Margaret is understandably distraught; Sylvia, when the news is relayed to her, is incandescent. Mary and Paul Hutchins (Mia Dillon and Gary Houston) duly descend, promptly followed by Sylvia, who turns upon the doorstep with Morris Binamin (Wilbur Fitzgerald), her sort-of new beau in Florida. Precarious polite conversation quickly descends into fierce religious dispute. Barbara’s parents claim their grandchild is Christian. Sylvia insists that Margaret is Jewish and has been to temple to prove it. Margaret gets upset and runs upstairs, asserting that she doesn’t even believe in God – to whom she now stops speaking.
Up to this point, Are You There has comprised lots of brief episodes. Not all the crises faced by Margaret are minor – being uprooted from her childhood home and friends in New York clearly isn’t – but each one seems to be overcome quickly, regardless of its seeming magnitude. Then comes this great slab of faith-based family strife. A blundering contradiction of Fremon Craig’s anxious sidelining of religion in the narrative, it accounts for what must be over fifteen minutes of the film’s total 106-minute running time. It’s not just incongruous but doubly infuriating – because of the grandparents’ attitudes and because it’s so unconvincing. When she talks with Herb before Margaret comes home, Barbara says nothing about calling off the visit to Sylvia: since Herb shows alarm even that his wife has renewed contact with her parents, his lack of reaction to the bombshell of cancelling Florida makes no sense. The staging of the disastrous family reunion – as a sitcom-style awkward situation – is jarringly out of kilter with how offensively Barbara’s parents have treated her and Herb in the past. And Margaret’s falling out with God is merely a means to an end: she’ll forgive Him when she finally menstruates. As she must and does, just before she sets off for 1971 summer camp.
Yet this works splendidly – no small feat when the narrative has so obviously been building up to it. The big bathroom moment, which sees Margaret alarmed then exultant, is both climactic and funny: Margaret calls for her mother then assures her she knows what to do, having practised for months. This scene is pitch-perfect confirmation of the director’s and her young lead’s success in creating a likeable and credible heroine. Something similar happens, on a smaller scale of course, with the other teenagers. As written, Nancy, Jamie and Gretchen are hardly multi-faceted characters but they’re nicely played; the same goes for their tall, prickly, precociously well-developed schoolfellow Laura Danker (Isol Young), with whom Margaret eventually makes peace and becomes friends; and Moose Freed (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), the gently eccentric, no-oil-painting boy who makes pocket money mowing lawns and whom Margaret naturally prefers to the official class heartthrob (Zack Brooks). Kelly Fremon Craig deserves a lot of credit for the satisfying orchestration of these young actors’ work.
The more established names in the cast are excellent too. Barbara’s a somewhat opaque character (an art teacher in New York, it’s not clear either why she has to give up work when the family moves or, late on, why she suddenly returns to it) but Rachel McAdams plays her with emotional precision and surprising comedic zest. The role of Herb is even sketchier but Benny Safdie does a fine job of expressing, without sentimentality, the man’s brimming love for his wife and daughter; Herb’s occasional exasperation is also strongly felt. Kathy Bates is an ethnically surprising choice to play a Jewish matriarch but her performance is one bulls-eye after another from the word go: when Margaret returns home to New York and her grandmother instantly spills the beans that it won’t be her home much longer, Bates leaves you in no doubt this has happened because Sylvia feels so bad about the move from her point of view. Kathy Bates has a ball with this role; she gives the audience a great time too.
23 May 2023
