While perusing audience reactions to You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, I saw this film show up a few times as either the superior version or a potential double-feature candidate with it. Now, this film has been on my radar for a while now, coming from the maker of one of my favourite modern coming-of-age films. I recognise that, at this point, it’s getting a bit redundant whenever I bring up looking at a film made by someone who made another film I’ve reviewed, since that’s the bulk of my selections for this month thus far (and spoilers, it’s going to keep going).
But in this case, I felt a real need to check this one out because Edge Of Seventeen and Craig’s work on it specifically is the progenitor for the wave of coming-of-age films for girls that we’ve experienced since. Lady Bird, Eighth Grade, Booksmart, Babyteeth… maybe Cuties depending on who you ask, even You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah; not only has this led to stories that hadn’t really gotten this level of mainstream attention beforehand finally getting it, but the average for this wave has been pretty damn solid. Even the ones that I’m not in total love with have their merits.
And thankfully, Craig is still tapped directly into that well of inspiration that led to her crafting one of the best coming-of-age films I’ve ever reviewed on here, for her adaptation of a book that I only know the name of because it showed up in one of Dr. Cox’s rants on Scrubs.
Where Edge Of Seventeen portrayed the process of growing up as a matter of becoming a better person, Are You There God? is more about the desire to learn how to be a person, regardless of the attitude attached. The journey of Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret is that of struggle between discovering who she is and what everyone else wants her to be. Being raised by an interfaith couple (Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie, who are excellent), she starts looking into Judaism, Christianity, and Catholicism and tries to find out where she fits in, if anywhere. Add onto that the social pressures connected to puberty, where her new friends are eager to be seen as women and making Margaret follow suit, and even for a pre-pubescent kid, she’s got a lot to deal with.
Fortson is amazing in the lead role. The perfect combination of sweetness and warmth, she is basically night-and-day compared to Hailee Steinfeld’s Nadine. Where Nadine’s arc came with a predominant sense of relief at the notion that, at long last, she’s finally becoming a functional human being, Margaret’s has more joy and genuine curiosity to it. Fortson and her immensely inviting relationship with her parents, her Jewish grandmother (Kathy Bates in one of her best performances in years), her friends, her teacher who convinces her to research different faiths for a school project, her crushes, her not-so-crushes; it’s just a joy to watch her do pretty much anything. The protective instinct is well and truly engaged whenever something bad or even just awkward happens to her, but when things actually turn out alright, it’s difficult to resist feeling as giddy as she does.
I particularly like how her coming-of-age story involves getting in touch with her own spirituality, like the titular recurring prayer that serves as narration throughout. I’ve talked before about experiences in my own childhood that influenced my approach to faith as an adult, and the way the script and direction followed Margaret as she tries out church, temple, and confession, gives a genuine impression of someone who wants to find her community.
Of course, where things get tense is when she tries to come to terms with how everyone around her is adamant to push her into a given direction. Making her Jewish, making her Christian, making her popular, making her mature; it illustrates the process of coming of age as becoming one’s own person by really narrowing in on the exterior influences behind that larger decision. There’s nothing wrong with children being exposed to different ways of life, and showing them that personal identity and contentment therein isn’t restricted to a single idea or even an idea that someone else believes is ‘right’ for them. But when it gets to the point of feeling pressured and needing to create a façade to give the impression that, don’t worry, they’re totally on the path that you want them to be on, it can either lead someone into a decision that they don’t really want, or even shutting them off from a decision they might have agreed with, had they not felt pressured to make it.
It captures something inherent about the lines between prepubescent to adolescent to adult, where we go from having all decisions made by others, to beginning to make our own decisions, to being expected to make all of our own decisions. Margaret, both as an inquisitive character and as an incredibly endearing presence on-screen, creates a truly empathetic and rather cute foundation for the larger questions about how we decide and discover what makes us us, and the story feels like a grounded but safe environment where such questions can be explored without feeling manipulative or out-of-place. I can’t say that this hit me as hard as Edge Of Seventeen did, since that was such a fresh take on the genre at the time, but there’s something I really like about the acknowledgement that kids want to know things, most of all about themselves, and that there’s no one ‘right’ answer as to what rings true to their more spiritual sides.
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