Okay, that was a tough watch… This feels like the best John Hughes movie that John Hughes never got to write and direct. The pain of adolescence felt so real! Yet the ending was sort of invalidating of everything that came before, because it seemed to boil down the lead character's struggles to immaturity and... lack of empathy?
The movie is about Nadine, a sardonic teenager played perfectly by Hailee Steinfeld. Nadine never fully recovered from the death of her father, the only person in her family that ever treated her right, because Nadine’s mother, played by Kyra Sedgwick, is a nutcase and only has eyes for Nadine’s brother Darian, played by Blake Jenner. We get the feeling that when they were little the mom used to buy Premium Pampers for precious Darian and sat Nadine on a greasy KFC bucket with two leg holes.
Nadine also could be experiencing some undiagnosed form of depression since the death of her father (Kyra and Blake never noticed this, of course), and she only had one person to turn to: her one and only childhood friend Krista, who ends up being even worse than Nadine’s mother, because Krista hooks up with Darian (knowing this was her best friend’s brother and that they didn’t have a good relationship) and keeps seeing him after Nadine is clearly not fine with this!
Krista even has the audacity to invite Nadine to be the third wheel in one of her dates with Darian. She knows Nadine is socially awkward. Nadine puts in some effort, yet Krista ABANDONS her to play beer pong with Darian's friends after Nadine goes with her to one of those movie house parties. And then Krista starts dating Darian and Nadine is suddenly the bad guy because she won’t accept this, and Darian is all like “why can’t you be happy for us Nadine? I’m dealing with a lot a pressure too, I know our mom is cray-cray”, and one day after Nadine cuts Krista off (you go Nadine!), Krista is hanging out at Nadine’s home and snogging with Darian in the living room couch. Oh, the disrespect!
But the story goes on and eventually Nadine ends up apologizing to Darian and extending an olive branch to that vicious little hussy Krista (“can we hang out later?”) and even to her poor excuse of a mother. The movie is super painful because we’re on Nadine’s side, but the ending makes it seem like she was being immature and was in the wrong all along. So maybe I’m immature myself and that’s the whole point of the movie (“we’re all emotionally teenagers”)?
I’m way past my teenage years and if my best and only friend in this world and the sibling I have a complicated relationship with ended up dating, and if my mother was like “oh, your dead father would be so ashamed of you if he could see how you’re behaving”, I’d legit follow Reddit’s go-to advice of going NC with these people. They are toxic and had no emotional accountability for Nadine and how their actions were affecting her. Nadine's pain shouldn't be gaslighted like this. I stand with her.
Any thoughts?
