The Diary of a Teenage Girl

I am constantly lamenting that my enjoyment of Hollywood movies has diminished so much during the past two decades. Many factors are responsible for this—the need for major releases to appeal to the broadest possible international markets; the migration of great writers, actors, and even directors away from the big screen over to television; improv comedy techniques usurping well-crafted and carefully honed screenwriting; and the scourge of generic computer-generated special effects filling most screens with too many nearly identical blockbusters about dudes with superpowers. Perhaps the saddest trend for me is the way adaptations of preexisting material are now judged by how closely they adhere to their original source rather than how well a filmmaker refashions and translates a story to cinematic terms. With less and less revenue coming in, major studios have gotten more and more risk-averse. They give us what we already know we like, rather than something that challenges or opens our eyes to something unexpected. The majority of commercial cinematic output is made for adolescents or made to appeal to the adolescent that still lives within adults. Happily, while the now hundred-year-old movie industry is desperately trying to recapture its youth and vitality, the way an over-the-hill billionaire might blow a ton of dough on an expensive car and a young trophy wife, the contemporary independent film movement that began in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s has now fully come of age.  If you make an effort to see these small pictures during their limited theatrical runs, or hunt them out on Netflix, iTunes, or other streaming services, you’ll be absolutely stunned by the level of quality and sophistication on display in so many début feature films these days.

Such is the case with The Diary of a Teenage Girl, written and directed by first-time filmmaker Marielle Heller and based on the semi-autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. Bel Powley stars as Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl whose sexual power, confusion, and maturity are ignited when she begins a romantic and physical relationship with her mother's boyfriend. The movie is frank and erotically charged, but it never crosses the line into exploitation. While there is no mistaking the distinctly American setting, styles, and cultural references in this film, it plays like a European picture in terms of its realistic depiction of a young girl’s coming of age. This is not one of those cautionary tales where something bad “happens to” the young main character. This is the story of a determined protagonist navigating her way through a complicated set of circumstances and discovering a full range of emotional consequences as a result of her choices and those of the adults in her life.

Twenty-something Powley is not an actual teenager, but her physicality and mannerisms are so spot-on that we instantly accept her as one and rarely wonder about the actress’s real age—a remarkable accomplishment both of acting and directing. Explicit movies concerning teenage sexual awakenings are extremely tricky, even when set during a more permissive era. When teen characters are played by actual minors, filmmakers are limited as to what they can depict on screen, and when actors in their twenties try to play characters who are five to eight years younger, they almost never fully shed their bodily and emotional maturity. Either way, movies of this nature risk distracting a great number of viewers—some pulled out of the story because of concern for the child actor, and others inappropriately titillated and frustrated that the envelope isn’t getting pushed farther.

But Heller and Powley succeed so brilliantly at grounding the viewer in their young protagonist’s perspective that we never have the sensation that we are merely observing someone else’s story from a removed distance. Rather we’re absorbed by the character and given the kind of virtual first-hand experience that only a great movie can extend. For the entire picture, we’re taken through a life that feels completely authentic. Minnie is our guide, but rather than narrating her tale from a place of wisdom and hindsight (the type of voiceover I usually disdain) we hear Minnie’s thoughts and reflections as diary entries made at the time of the events the film depicts.

In lesser hands, this picture could easily have fallen into a morass of period-piece coming-of-age clichés. The 1970s, when this story takes place, is well-covered cinematic ground. Even if you didn’t grow up in this decade, as I did, you probably have your own “memories” of the era from all the movies and TV you’ve seen both from that time and about that time. It is ordinarily hard for directors, costume designers, and set decorators to avoid going overboard with the surface kitsch, creating a distraction that can pull us out of the narrative. And actors often wind up playing caricatures rather than characters. Again this movie risks that potential with the casting of comic actor Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids, MacGruber, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) as Minnie’s mother Charlotte.  Seeing Wiig and her costars on the poster outside the cinema, dressed in distinctly ‘70s garb and sitting in front of wallpaper with the typically garish colors and patterns of the era, led me to expect a much slighter picture. But in this movie, we get the Kristen Wiig of The Skeleton Twins, Friends with Kids, and Whip It.  She plays what could come across as a stereotypical permissive, inattentive, druggy ‘70s parent with such sincerity that we never dismiss her or laugh her off. We feel a great deal of sympathy for Charlotte, despite her flaws. 

Similarly, Heller’s treatment of the boyfriend Monroe, played by Alexander Skarsgård (Melancholia, What Maisie Knew, The East) is astonishingly compassionate. I’m sure it must also be the case in Gloeckner’s graphic novel that Monroe, a man guilty of cheating on his girlfriend and the long-term statutory rape of her daughter is not depicted as a villain. Heller explores the motivations, weaknesses, and integrity of each of her characters with such honesty and with such a total absence of the moralizing that usually accompanies stories of this kind (at least the ones told in American movies), that we’re forced to discard our own preconceived judgments and give ourselves over to the experiences of these specific characters. Everyone in this story gets hurt and experiences some emotional damage, but there are no “victims,” at least in the traditional movie sense of that term.  This complex, principled, and often funny film is about as far from the typical knee-jerk reactionary postings that pass for social discourse in our contemporary culture as I can think of.

A few sections of The Diary of a Teenage Girl dip into some of the expected genre tropes which the rest of the picture skillfully avoids—specifically a mid-second act “dark night of the soul” sequence, the likes of which we’ve seen in almost all movies about children who grow up too fast. And like most of the best indie films, especially by first-timers, the visual storytelling takes a backseat to the evocation of feelings, tone, and intimate details. But Heller invents ways to express her main character’s thoughts in pictures as well as words and behaviors. The sketches and cartoons Minnie draws to accompany her diary musings are brought to life through animation, which is another technique I usually find unsuccessful. In this movie, however, Heller seamlessly connects Minnie’s sexual awakening with her artistic ascendance. In this teenage girl’s diary, which will one day blossom into the graphic novel of an accomplished woman, the drawings are as important as the words. 

The late critic Roger Ebert once said, “Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.” It’s too bad Ebert didn’t live to see The Diary of a Teenage Girl, because that quotation gets right to the heart of this small, rough cinematic gem.