Review: Judy Blume goes to Hollywood in Are You There God?…

There’s Not a Cynical Molecule in the Big Screen Adaptation of Are you there God? It’s me, Margareta soft, playful and reverential adaptation of Judy Blumes famous coming-of-age novel about the daily problems of an 11-year-old girl.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been upsetting for someone to write candidly about puberty for an audience going through it, but it was and, in many ways, still is.

In one scene, Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), who hasn’t started her period yet, decides to prepare for it by shopping for sanitary napkins at the convenience store with her friend Janie (Amari Alexis Price). The two girls watch in horror as the older woman at the checkout leaves for a break just as they approach and is replaced by a shaggy-haired teenager. Panicking, Margaret throws a packet of mints at the boxes. Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) relishes the excruciating awkwardness, letting time slow down as the treadmill creaks.

It’s one of many charming moments that evoke the weirdness of being 11 years old. Not only are you coping with the normal pains of everyday existence and accepting the fact that your parents might be people too, you and all of your classmates are transforming at very different and confusing rates. In one of the all-too-rare shots depicting Margaret’s literal point of view, the camera pans to look at the armpit hair of a local boy, Moose.

The craziest thing about Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret, opening in theaters on Friday is that it took Blume over 50 years to let Hollywood do it, at least officially. There have been decades of movies, shows and books that have been created in the image of Blume and his perfectly flawed young heroine, who may technically be stuck in 1970, but whose issues of faith, crush, of friends, of bodies, of relatives are persistent.

This familiarity is both a strength and a weakness of the film. There is a melancholic solace in watching this turbulent year in Margaret’s life in which her parents, Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb (Benny Safdie), estrange New York family, friends and her well-behaved grandmother. -loved Sylvia (Kathy Bates, resplendent in glittering caftans and semi-matching ensembles) and the unknown: suburban New Jersey. But there’s also the sense that we’ve seen a lot of it already.

One of the things that made the book so meaningful to so many people was its unflinching honesty. It didn’t sound filtered or bothered. It was just the truth of a young girl with a weird, complicated, naive, cruel, kind and whimsical spirit and sometimes even unflattering and (gasp) unlovable. It was like looking in another person’s journal that was kind of safe because it wasn’t yours, but kind of dangerous and transgressive because you realize you had thoughts like that too. In the end, it was comforting to know that you weren’t alone.

The film treats Margaret’s confessionals haphazardly. Sometimes she talks to herself out loud in her room, sometimes in voiceover. But much of this stream of consciousness remains unsaid. And what is said is sometimes short.

With no history to the book, however, there’s still plenty to appreciate from Fortson’s pleasant presence to a very good performance from McAdams, who elevates every scene she’s in.

Blume, also the subject of a wonderful documentary Judy Blume Forever (now streaming on Prime Video), titled Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret a piece of nostalgia, aimed at women who grew up reading it. Perhaps she knows that for some reason there is a distance between the viewer and Margaret in the film, which is the opposite of the book experience. Sometimes it even feels a bit sanitized and rushed to tick boxes, even dramatic climaxes to get to the end of the year.

Eleven is kind of a magic age to go to the movies, or at least it was for me. That’s the year I started seeing movies at the cinema with friends, not with my parents. When the movies are something you chose or believe you chose to see, they hit a little differently. Some always stay with you, no matter how good they are. I was lucky enough to be 11 at the end of 1994, when for some reason Hollywood seemed to be making movies just for me.

This is of course not true at all. At the very least, most movies were just NOT for me, and as a suburban white straight girl, that wasn’t a niche target to hit. But there were a slew of sizeable movies made with a preteen girl in mind: Little Women, Clueless, A Little Princess and Now & Then, Blume and Margaret’s most direct descendant, and, on television, My So-Called. Life.

Films like these hardly exist anymore, and certainly not in theaters. Tweens would do well to look up Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret outside. It has all the ingredients of a classic for the next generation.

Are you there God? It’s Me, Margaret, a Lionsgate release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for thematic material involving sex education and suggestive material. Duration: 105 minutes. Two and a half out of four stars.

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MPA Definition of PG-13: Parents Strongly Cautioned. Some content may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.