Movies steeped in the world of the American Teen tend to come in one of two flavors: A cartoony, mocking satire, in which cliched caricatures act in disharmony until everything magically comes together at the end; or a sobering dirge, in which kids are shown to be reckless, hateful to one another, and full of doom.
Kelly Fremon Craig's fetching The Edge of Seventeen, however, deftly straddles the demarcation line between these two options, creating a comedy very much about teens that provides enough emotional sophistication to be witty and, at times, dutifully solemn. The film is sincerely funny, but not without its bleaker tinges: The "edge" referenced in the title turns out to be a surprisingly sharp blade.
As many of these films tend to do, we are following the harrowing times of a single teen, 17-year-old Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), a droll, socially awkward girl whose loving father (Eric Keenleyside) dies when she's quite young, leaving her to contend with a neurotic mother, Mona (Kyra Sedgwick), who doesn't connect with her, and Darian, her hunkish brother (Blake Jenner), who seems blessed with all the winning attributes that she is not, putting them at fierce odds.
Fortunately, Nadine has a best friend since second grade -- Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), and the two are pretty much inseparable ... right up until Krista hooks up with Darian, and the two begin to date in earnest.
Crushed and betrayed, Nadine is suddenly forced to fend for herself, navigating her obsessive crush on a beefcake senior named Nick (Alexander Calvert), while fending off the shy advances of Erwin (Hayden Szeto), a sweet-faced fellow who is equally socially impaired -- mostly on her own. In her spare time, she visits the classroom of her mercilessly sardonic history teacher, Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson), whose superpower is the ability to one-up her natural teen sarcasm to near lethal levels.
You can likely guess where this is all headed, and you would be correct. Fremon Craig's film, which she also wrote, isn't exactly breaking new ground, especially in its more conventional plot points, but the script is clever and concise.
It's at its best when it's at its most unyielding, making a strong case for the philosophical difference between depressed teens and their parents: Nadine draws strength from the idea that her suffering is unique and therefore special; Mona tells her the secret to feeling better is to imagine how everyone in the world is suffering from the exact same misery, only some are better at masking it.
The film is also smart when it comes to sex. Nadine is still a virgin, but not exactly by choice. Things come to a horrible pinnacle for her when, in a fit of anguished pique, she accidentally hits "send" on a particularly randy note she writes in desperation to Nick, one in which she describes, in some awkward detail, exactly what she wants to do with him. As with everything else, Nadine wants to joke about the subject, to relieve the tension she feels about it, but we are painfully aware of the nature of her ploy. Sex isn't beyond her; nor does the film, which is rated a straight "R" for language, dance around the subject. She wants to try it, but is too socially awkward to figure out the right approach.
Fremon Craig, whose only previous credit was writing Post Grad, a 2009 film about a young woman who is forced to move back home with her crazy family after she earns her degree, has a good handle on the direction, and the pitiable manner of the self-loathing ("I have to spend the rest of my life with myself," Nadine moans at one point), and she doesn't hesitate to show the ugly messiness of distorted nuclear families. Nadine and her mother truly don't get along (her mother views handsome, well-adjusted Darian as her angel, and Nadine as the anvil hanging around her neck), and the siblings seem to have genuine loathing for each other, a relationship spiked with barbed insults and brutal disparagement. Because the characters in her life are so well realized, we feel much of Nadine's acute pain at the destruction of her extremely delicate social ecosystem.
This is no bogus Modern Family scenario, wherein no matter how dysfunctional the characters appear to be, everything comes together in a giant, saccharine group hug at the end. True, the film does turn far more conventional in its wrap-up, but since Nadine's suffering has felt real and significant, we don't begrudge her finally taking the first steps toward learning how to live with herself.
It is a bit trickier to contend with the casting of Steinfeld, who is actually strong in the role but nevertheless seems too cosmetically beautiful to be as much of an outcast as the film purports. For much of the film, she wears a garishly ugly blue jacket, eschews makeup, and her hair is often unflatteringly flopped around her face, but you can't quite lose the feeling that Steinfeld is still beautiful-playing-ugly, a trap many young, glamorous actors fall into, trying to suppress the otherworldly charisma that likely got them the role in the first place. Steinfeld tries to make up for it with a show of believably petulant neurosis, but it's clear from Nadine's sparkling wit and shimmering personality that she would likely be far more popular than the film suggests.
This plays off the very kind of fantasy that many average teens harbor, the idea that they are somehow secretly radiant and stunning, and only need the right combination of accessories -- physical and emotional -- to emerge from their unremarkable cocoons and display their true vibrancy. As a primer on becoming self-actualized and getting past our fears and neuroses, the film is on the right track, but using such an obviously beautiful actress to portray those qualities feels a bit misleading. If only it were that easy.
"There are two types of people in the world," Nadine informs us near the film's beginning, "those who radiate confidence; and those hoping the others will die in a fiery explosion." As much as I don't begrudge Nadine her positive epiphanies at the end, this still feels like a much more honest assessment of the world.
MovieStyle on 11/18/2016