Timely period piece

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2023 (1248 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Full disclosure: I’m part of that first wave of Judy Blume fans who navigated puberty in the 1970s with her frank, empathetic, often hilarious help. Books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t were passed around among friends, their most revealing scenes obsessively discussed at sleepovers.

Finally coming decades later, this warm and winning adaptation of one of Blume’s best-known and best-loved novels has kept its original 1970 setting, and viewers of a certain age will experience the nostalgia centres of their brains lighting up like fireworks.

There’s the familiar chant of “We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” There’s the mixed anticipation and dread (mostly dread) surrounding the party game Two Minutes in the Closet. There are wood-panelled rec rooms, training bras, massive sanitary napkins and Cat Stevens. There’s the weirdly technical health-class film explaining “men-STROO-ation,” and pre-internet kids trying to figure out sex using only Playboy magazines and a purloined medical text.

Occasionally, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, is a bit too self-conscious about its period-piece status. (The soundtrack, in particular, feels like a K-Tel “hits of the ’70s” compilation.) But mostly, the movie evokes, with loads of affection and optimism, a certain kind of middle-class, suburban, Free To Be… You and Me childhood.

For younger viewers, meanwhile, for whom 1970 is a distant and exotic country with really bad cell reception, this coming-of-age story catches the timeless core and multigenerational appeal of Blume’s books, with their deep understanding of the pain and uncertainty of childhood and adolescence, especially for girls.

Scripted by Blume herself and Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), who also directs, the film handles the problems of puberty in a way that’s both deeply serious and lightly comic.

In the late summer of 1970, 11-year-old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) has just moved with her mom and dad (Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie) from New York City to the New Jersey suburbs.

She’s at an especially tricky juncture in her young life. Margaret is still a child, but she’s trying to figure out how to be a teen. She’s desperate to fit in, desperate to be considered “normal” and frantically wondering whether she’ll ever get her period, if she’ll ever “develop.”

Hoping to make new friends, she joins the “club” run by new neighbour and incipient mean girl Nancy (Elle Graham), where bras and boy-talk are compulsory and wearing socks with your loafers is forbidden.

On top of this social confusion, Margaret’s father is Jewish and her mother is Christian, and they have decided to let Margaret sort this all out later. Margaret wants to sort it out now, though, and she begins by talking to God about her problems. She introduces herself — that’s where the title comes from — and then adds, politely, “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you.”

The story is carried by a lovely, unforced and effective performance from newcomer Fortson, who gets solid support from the actors playing the sometimes perplexed but mostly compassionate adults in her life.

McAdams brings a lot of spark to Barbara Simon, who, like Margaret, is handling the move from New York City to the suburbs, along with giving up her job to concentrate on home and family. (If you’ve seen The Stepford Wives, you know that doesn’t always work out.)

Kathy Bates is a delight — as always — as Margaret’s paternal grandmother, a real New York City dame for whom the wilds of New Jersey seem impossibly remote.

Margaret’s tumultuous year is conveyed in a way that feels honest, modest and, above all, emotionally real. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a touching, tender look at girlhood that will reward the book’s OG fans while drawing in new readers — and that’s something that matters in these fraught times, as so many books are coming under threat and a new generation of tell-it-like-it-is YA authors is facing censorship.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com