Are you there god? It's me, Margaret.

 

DIRECTED BY-:
Kelly Fremon Craig
STARRING-:
Abby Ryder Fortson
Rachel McAdams
Elle Graham
Kathy Bates
Benny Safdie
YEAR OF RELEASE-:
2023
PREMISE-:
When her family moves from the city to the suburbs, 11-year-old Margaret navigates new friends, feelings, and the beginning of adolescence.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS

The cinematography, set design, and costumes of the film are very colorful and vibrant, which lends really well to the tone of the screenplay. 

While I wouldn’t call the editing or the music anything exceptional, they are decent enough and work satisfactorily well for the film.

HUMOR

The film has a lot of funny scenes, and though not all of them made me laugh out loud, there were a few that definitely did, like —: 

• Anytime the girls do the “I must increase my bust” exercise.

• The very awkward scene in which Margaret and Janie try to buy sanitary napkins from a pharmacy.

• Sylvia “flirting” with Morris (who’s ostensibly older than her) by saying “I’m sure your cholesterol is low”.

• The cringe-inducing moment when Sylvia toasts by saying “L’Chaim” to Barbara’s parents’ faces, and Herb trying to save the situation by asking them if they watched Jeopardy!. 

THE PERFORMANCES

Rachel McAdams and Abby Fortson do a fantastic job and are definitely the highlights of the film. Child actors can often be quite mediocre but that thankfully wasn’t the case here. Benny Safdie, Kathy Bates, and the rest of the supporting cast also did a pretty good job at portraying their characters.

CHARACTERS

The strongest aspects of the film, after the performances, are its story and characters. Before analyzing the central characters, I would like to praise the film for making almost all of its side characters feel realistic, thanks to the dialogues and performances. 

Even though she was kind of close-minded when it came to religion, I appreciated how they managed to ground Sylvia’s character in reality by showing us her various, admittedly hilarious, antics stemming from the loneliness she suffers from after her family moves out. 

I liked how the film subverted the “popular handsome guy” trope by making Phillip Leroy kind of a misogynistic asshole. 

Herb, though not multi-dimensional, still had a charming presence throughout the movie as a loving and supportive husband and father.

Moving on to the main characters, I want to start with-:

Nancy

Nancy is kind of a mean, overbearing, showy leader of her secret club, who doesn’t miss any opportunity of being condescending towards her peers. She always wants to be the best  in her group and often brings other people down to prop herself up. I mean, literally one of her first lines is - “I live in the bigger house up the street.” 

While her characterization could’ve just stopped at that, I appreciated that the film provided us hints for the reasons as to why she is behaving the way she is. We’re shown that her brother regularly bullies her, and that her mom acts kind of cold towards her when she first gets her period. We get a sense that she’s trying to put up this mean, dominating personality not only for others but also herself, projecting her pain outwards to cope with a dysfunctional family - something that she, in a pretty sad scene, is unable to maintain when the reality of getting her first period hits her. Hence, it’s interesting to think that maybe the reason she is so obsessed with growing up is because of the lack of love and warmth she receives at home. When Margaret and Janie leave her to dance with Laura, she has a reaction which stuck with me - it’s not exactly an angry expression that she makes, it’s more an expression of begrudging acceptance, with an implication that perhaps she too wanted to join them dancing, but was afraid to do so because she had already strained her relationship with Laura and Margaret. So, while Nancy could come across as obnoxious in the beginning of the movie, by the end of the film she surprisingly turned out to be quite a tragic character. 

Margaret

On top of the awkwardness that comes with being a 11-year-old in a new city, Margaret struggles with trying to fit in with Nancy’s secret club and its ridiculous necessities of not wearing socks, wearing a bra, liking the boy that everyone has a crush on, hating and slut shaming Laura Danker because she experienced puberty early, and competing with each other about who gets their period first. Naturally, her desire for going through puberty as soon as possible so that she can be “regular and normal like everybody else” is intertwined with her trying to conform to her friend group. However, we see her association with the secret club and its values, gradually erode after two key incidents - when Nancy lies to everyone about getting her period, therefore peeling away the facade of her holier-than-thou personality, and when Margaret feels extremely guilty after parroting the same mean remarks to Laura that Nancy does. In this moment, she realizes she doesn’t want to become Nancy, and rectifies her mistake by asking Laura to dance with her on graduation day, as a sign of apology. I liked how Janie also decided to join Margaret and Laura dancing, as it was earlier implied (when they bought sanitary napkins together) that Janie is perhaps Margaret’s closest friend in the secret club.

Apart from this, Margaret also struggles with making sense of her relationship with god, and trying to decide the religion she’d like to follow. For majority of the film, her “prayers” to god are essentially diary entries filled with desperate wishes that she’d like to be fulfilled. 

We learn that Margaret’s parents haven’t forced her to follow any religion, and have given her the freedom to choose (or not choose) a religion of her liking when she’s an adult — which makes sense for her parents to do, given the difficulties they had to face in the past because  of their respective religions. So, as advised by her teacher, Margaret chooses religion as her research topic and decides to “try out” Judaism and Christianity, by going to their respective places of worship. Naturally, her opinions on these religions are based almost entirely on how bored or entertained she was during the proceedings. Her outlook on god, however, seems to sour when things repeatedly do not go the way she had prayed them to. This delicate relationship pretty much completely breaks when she witnesses a fight break out between the members of her family over the religion Margaret must follow, causing her to declare in her research paper that all religion does is make people fight, and perhaps there really is no one up there listening to her prayers. While submitting this paper to her teacher, she has a breakdown and cries in the school bathroom. Until this point, I think the film was pretty impressive at developing the “exploring religion” aspect of her character — there were clear setups and a payoff culminating in her breakdown which is arguably her lowest point in the entire film. So, it became even more important to conclude this subplot efficiently and satisfyingly before the film ended. This is where, I personally think the film stumbled a little bit. Margaret says thanks to her teacher and compliments him for “being a really good one”, which made me feel like I missed a crucial scene between the two, because he doesn’t really  help her in anything for the entire film, apart from just suggesting her the topic for her research. This felt like a missed opportunity, as we could have seen him counseling / guiding her, or just having a heart-to-heart with her about religion and god after she has a breakdown in front of him. It would’ve made her gratitude towards him more meaningful and impactful, and her thanking god at the end of the film feel more organic.

Barbara

Barbara, along with the awkwardness of raising an adolescent child, has her own struggles that she has to face. After moving to New Jersey, Barbara decides to stop teaching art and focus entirely on her household and school committee responsibilities. As we learn from her dialogues, this is perhaps because she feels guilty for not being like the other traditional housewives and not spending enough time with her daughter. However, the film reminds us that no matter how hard she tries to suppress her love for art, it’s always going to remain something that she’s truly passionate about, unlike doing the school committee tasks that Jan assigns to her. This brings me to her next trait - she is too kind for her own good, and has trouble saying no to people. This is apparent in her very first scene in the school committee meeting, where she happily volunteers for every job with an enthusiastic “Sure, why not? I’d like to help!” expression on her face. 

We also see her holding the entry door of a mall open for way longer than necessary, just so more people can enter. She’s unable to say no to Jan when she’s given the task of cutting additional stars on top of the heap of stars she already cut. Seeing this, a parallel could be drawn - Jan is to Barbara what Nancy is to Margaret, at least when it comes to the dynamic of their relationships. Finally, as a sign of forgiveness, Barbara sends a postcard to her antisemitic parents who practically disowned her for marrying a jew. 

However, after witnessing the fight between her parents and Sylvia, and seeing Margaret have a breakdown about religion in front of the whole family, Barbara goes through a moment of self realization — In a heartbreaking scene, she blames herself for the fight, perhaps realizing that it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for her overly kind and forgiving nature. She has a moment with her daughter, where she says, “It gets tiring trying so hard all the time, doesn’t it?”, a line said to obviously empathize with Margaret’s struggles, but also referring to her own tendencies of pleasing people. Therefore, she consequently decides to make two important changes in her life - She returns to her passion of teaching art, and finally refuses to carry out another one of Jan’s tasks for the school committee. Overall, even though Barbara wasn’t the protagonist, I was really impressed by how much work went into developing her character, and achieving an arc that not only made sense but was also very emotionally satisfying to watch.

THEMES

The film primarily tries to, and succeeds at, tackling the theme of change — that happens internally in our bodies, but also more external changes that constantly occur in life regardless of age. Margaret (and her friend group), Barbara, and Sylvia are all going through changes in their lives albeit drastically different ones. Margaret has to face the changes that arrive (or don’t arrive) at the onset of puberty, along with her changing perspecitves on religion and god. 

Barbara not only has to ensure that she is dealing adequately with Margaret’s transition to womanhood, but also has to adapt to changes in her own lifestyle, where she has given up her passion in favor of what she thinks is the greater good. By the end, she has to bring about changes in aspects of her character after experiencing their negative consequences. 

Finally, Sylvia has to learn to live with the changes in her family dynamic, and has to seek love and companionship in Margaret, and perhaps in a romantic partner. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

To conclude, Are you there god? It's me, Margaret is a wonderfully acted, very funny, and extremely heartwarming movie with endearing characters and a genuine, relatable story. While some of its subplots could have been wrapped up a little bit better, the overall writing and the performances more than make up for it and ensure a fun, engaging, and emotional viewing experience.

RATING-: 7/10