Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. - Review Thread

Unsurprisingly I cannot say I ever read Judy Blume’s famed 1970 novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” as a youth. It was about god and menstration, two things I very much did not want to read about as an adolescent. Honestly I don’t think they’re necessarily things I particularly want to watch a movie about as an adult either, but for different reasons. The film retains the film’s early 70s setting and looks at a middle aged girl over the course of a school year as she adjusts to a new environment after moving to the suburbs and meets a number of rather nosy new friends who talk rather openly amongst each other about their entrances into puberty, which seems like pretty odd behavior to me but maybe girls are a bit more open about these things than dudes were in my experience. The film also rests on this girl’s rather confused musings about religion being the child of a secular but mixed faith household, which she approaches in this kind of interestingly child-like way. The film is generally an attempt to capture youthful confusion, which is presumably the goal of the book as well though it’s a bit harder to do in a film than it is in a first person text. The film was seemingly well timed as it released right as there was a hysteria around school library books, which seemed like a smart time to highlight Judy Blume as the original scandalizer of pearl clutching PTA moms, and it certainly helped that the movie was made with some real sensitivity and skill, though I’m still not sure this material fits perfectly into the structure of a three act film. The movie ends with Margaret about as confused as she was at the beginning, maybe moreso, which I’m pretty sure is by design but it doesn’t necessarily read as a full character arc and sits a tad awkwardly. Ultimately I respect this movie, and liked it to some extent for what it is, but I can’t say it really hit me like it seems to be hitting some of its more ecstatic proselytizers out there. Out of the recent movies about preteen girl adolescence I think I much prefer Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, which is the more contemporary and vital portrait of the age and hit closer to home, but this one’s good too.

Side note: This was among the very last wave of new Blu-Rays/DVDs that Netflix's discs through the mail service appears to have ordered before deciding to shut down in September and will likely be the last "new release" I see through that service.  Sigh, end of an era.