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.
This movie is absolutely amazing. For one thing, it's a feat of editing, approximating just what a swift, bouncy read Margaret is on the page without feeling at all rushed. The short, clipped, detail-rich scenes, just like Judy Blume's compressed chapters, keep us attuned to multiple characters, tones, and thematic threads at once while allowing quite a lot else to bubble up in the silences and the spaces between. The forward velocity of the storytelling is impressive throughout, but the important pauses get their due, and you really do feel a year has gone by when it's over (in a good way!). The Full Monty's Nick Moore and It Ends With Us's Oona Flaherty are the jointly billed editors, but I also see a tucked-away credit for "additional editing" by Ang Lee's magician/accomplice Tim Squyres. Not sure how the cutting room got so crowded, which usually doesn't imply a happy story, but however complex the gestation and delivery, the baby is just beautiful.
Margaret is also impeccably well cast, by Francine Maisler and Melissa Kostenbauder. Not just Margaret herself, but all four of the main school girls, and Moose, and Philip, and poor Laura Danker, who feels awkward now but is going to have a great life. Not just McAdams (absolutely sublime, I hate the Academy) and not just Bates, but the late-arriving parents of the McAdams character, one of whom tried to guilt Autumn out of her abortion in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which I coincidentally just watched today. Also that dreamboat teacher, played by Echo Kellum, and the woman who introduces the filmstrip about menstruation, and the kid working the checkout counter at that pharmacy.
Margaret is also intimidatingly well-directed, and the best proof of that statement is that the movie works on every single level it is asking to work, yet it doesn't feel fussed over at all. That's directing: meticulous balancing and management, while endowing the movie with its own respiratory system, seeming to breathe its own autonomous life, in and out, in and out. Extra points to that super talented director, Kelly Fremon Craig, because she is also an ingenious screenwriter, preserving everything crucial about Blume's novel while rearranging key scenes into an even more perfect order, growing out the Barbara character, and dialing up an important sequence of group conflict so that it stings even more and impacts different characters differently.
Are you still there, Meryl? I still love this movie. Get this baby into the Criterion Collection! You know they'll heed the message if it comes from You!! Grade:A–
Awards:
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Supporting Performance (McAdams; tie)
