Animated, heartfult performances and tough grrrl sports are windowdressing for Whip It’s bazillion Teen Movie clichés— but who cares when the window dressing is this good.
The awesome Drew Barrymore doesn’t misfire on her directorial debut, but neither does she let loose.
She sticks to a formula: small-town girl, Ellen Page, discovers there’s more to life than waitressing in a small-town diner and being forced to enter beauty pagents by her mother.
Here comes trouble!
She’s dying for the bright lights of the city, but does that mean leaving her family and best friend behind because they don’t understand the changes she’s going through? Are her parents going to push her away!? Is she going to have trouble being accepted by her much older new friends when they find out she’s only 17!?! Is there going to be a boy somewhere in all of this, probably in a band or something!?!! One who’s, like, really-really hot, who’s a bit like Micheal Cera but a little badder (but not too bad)?!?!!!
Yes. Yes. Yes. The plot is as see through as crotchless knickers.
Wait — did I mention that the movie is set around the punk-rock, shabby, chic of the Austin, Texas, Roller Derby scene? Yeah, it is. So it’s sort of like a sports movie too.
Whip It is stuffed with quirk and verve and it all zips along at a great pace, so the threadbare story stays mostly in the background and the characters to the fore.
Great performances from the leads and genuinely funny dialogue are made do all the heavy lifting here, but you wonder what this movie could have been like if they’d ditched the Dodgeball ‘we can beat ‘em’’ bullshit.
The relationships between the characters are convincing, and (to my outsiders perspective) it’s one of the best portrayals of teen friendship since Super Bad.
Page, as she proved she could in Juno, does a high-wire balancing act between sass and vunerability, and Alia Shawkat (Maeby from Arrested Development) as her best friend is just fucking brilliant. Don’t know who she is yet? You will. She’s got another two or three movies coming out this year.
What’s really great about this is that it’s a teen movie, made by women — as well as Drew helming the film, the script was adapted by Shauna Cross from her own novel — and I assume that there was a female audience in mind. With all this going against it, it still manages to be fun. (ha ha)
Whip It is no classic. It’s not a Dazed and Confused or a Say Anything. It’s a smart, believable (if idealised) take on finding yourself, and it looked like everyone had a ball while making it.
It’s good. But it’s played it too safe to be great.
By: Brian Herron.
Here’s the trailer:
