Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
First screened and reviewed in December 2023 / Most recently screened and reviewed in March 2025
Director: Kelly Fremon Craig. Cast: Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Benny Safdie, Elle Graham, Amari Price, Katherine Kupferer, Isol Young, Aidan Wojtak-Hissong, Zackary Brooks, Echo Kellum, Kate MacCluggage, Simms May, Landon Baxter, Jecobi Swain, Mia Dillon, Gary Houston, Wilbur Fitzgerald. Screenplay: Kelly Fremon Craig (based on the novel by Judy Blume). In Brief:
Disarming in emotional sensitivity and range while pretty much nailing all areas of craft.
VOR:④
Notable for being the best movie about a pre-teen girl since—I was a pre-teen? Attention to detail on the level of an old studio classic.
Are you there, Meryl? It's me, Nick. I've just been feeling so bad about responding coolly and sometimes peevishly to so many of the big Fall movies that are being hyped as grown-up stories and awards contenders. I know it's my decision and not the marketers' or the publicists' or the reviewers' or the HFPA's whether I like something, and I've tried several available offerings to see what fits me. But for some reason, almost nothing feels right. Meryl, I know you love the movies as much as I do (though you love family even more), and you don't believe that an accessible, resonant emotional exchange among specifically defined characters is automatically worse or better or smaller or bigger than an artisanal exploration that uses the unique languages and capacities of cinema to illuminate something about personal or collective experience. Do you think you could place in my path a movie that's either of these things, or maybe both of these things (but maybe one more than the other), with an almost tangible empathy with everybody in the story (though for some even more than for others) and a lucid recollection of what early adolescence felt like for so many people, and some actors and some editors and a costume designer that feel completely attuned, beat by beat by beat, to the tale at hand and to the writer-director's witty, compassionate, modulated perspective on a text she clearly adores?
106 minutes later...
Dear Meryl... Thank you so, so, so, so much. I knew you'd hear me! And I know it was you, because you even sent your favorite costume designer. Though I didn't even know it was her until the credits came up! I just knew that everybody's wardrobe was so expressive and revealing and fun, without ever pulling focus or being cartoonish, and so particular to each person without suggesting irreparable clashes among them. But Meryl, you know and I know that the clothes weren't really the reason that I cried so often and also laughed so much and also emitted such deep sighs of recognizing experiences I had but also discovering some that I didn't. Thank you, Meryl. I believe in you!
And thank you, Kelly Fremon Craig, and Judy Blume, and Abby Ryder Fortson, and Rachel McAdams. I believe in all of you as well. And I'm sorry I didn't show up for you in the cinemas, which would have been really helpful. I made a mistake, and I apologize. But I got there eventually. Grade:B+
Awards:
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Supporting Performance (McAdams; tie)
