Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. 2023 in Google Drive
For all our snap-bracelet readiness to embrace girl power and its concomitant hashtags (#yougotthis!), depictions of preadolescents that are worthy of their subjects are thin on the ground. Perhaps because most tweens will just “watch up” anyway, big entertainment has slouched into a comfortable stance of pumping out cutesy kids’ content and edgy fare about high school, without bothering to give much thought to the beautifully messy middle ground.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s entry to the woefully underserved category of period dramas (make of that what you will), is destined to become a classic. Based on – but not entirely wedded to – Judy Blume’s seminal 1970 novel of the same name, the film is an entertaining comedy that also happens to be a stunning evocation of the fear and yearning that come with standing on the precipice of adulthood.
Blume’s novel featured a half-Jewish, half-Christian protagonist who was questioning the existence of God while awaiting salvation via the arrival of her period, and eager to start wearing a bra. These preoccupations come to touchingly radical life in Fremon Craig’s funny-sad adaption, where entire minutes of footage are devoted to Margaret Simon (the remarkable Abby Ryder Fortson) trying on an absorbent pad or investigating different ways to sport a bra when her body does not require one.
There’s little of the derivative about this film, which is largely thanks to Fortson’s incandescent performance at Margaret. She doesn’t play it cheesy or glib as she navigates life as an almost-there. Her eyes brim with wonder and wariness but the body part she puts to greatest use is her shoulders, which tell epics with their slumps and herky jerks. Here is a girl caught between childhood and adulthood, caring and not caring.
