'Are You There God?' Brings the Classic Book to Theaters This Weekend

Judy Bloom's novel Are You There God?, It's Me, Margaret has long been the traget of book-banning campaigns, and it's also long been a beloved take on adolescence. Now, a film adaptation of the book is coming at a time when book banning campaigns are seeing a resurgence in America, making the movie both nostalgic and timely. Read on for details.

Via Slate.

The 1970s-style title font and macramé-décor chic of Kelly Fremon Craig’s adaptation of the beloved Judy Blume novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret may at first read as retro (though Ann Roth’s costumes are so delicious I foresee a craze for double-knit schoolgirl pinafores). But with book censorship in American libraries at a 20-year high, this frank, funny, and tender movie plays as anything but nostalgic. A recently proposed Florida law that would forbid all discussion of menstruation in elementary school settings (an idea, it should be said, of jaw-dropping stupidity and cruelty) is cheerfully broken by nearly every scene in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the story of an 11-year-old girl in suburban New Jersey who longs as ardently to get her first period as she does to establish a personal relationship with the deity of the title.

Writer-director Craig’s 2016 debut The Edge of Seventeen established her as a keenly observant chronicler of adolescence. With Margaret, she takes that skill to the next level of difficulty, adapting a property familiar to generations of readers--one that its author long resisted turning over for cinematic adaptation—and finding new things for us to love in it, while staying true to those we loved already. In Blume’s novel, Margaret’s mother is a stay-at-home parent who paints a little as a hobby. In the film, as played by a never-better Rachel McAdams, Barbara Simon is a more ambitious and complex figure: an art teacher who gives up her job in Manhattan to move to the suburbs with her husband and daughter, unsuccessfully attempting to reinvent herself as a kitchen-bound PTA mom. These additions to the character of Margaret’s mother pull from elements of the author’s own life story: In the 1960s, Blume, too, was an unfulfilled stay-at-home mother in New Jersey, trying to find a way to express herself creatively while raising two children and keeping house for a working husband.

Lurking within this film’s coming-of-age story is a subplot about women’s liberation in the style of ’70s classics like An Unmarried Woman, with a radiant McAdams nearly stealing the show from the also-extraordinary newcomer Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret. What keeps that theft from occurring is how fully the two seem like a real mother and daughter, each with her own inner struggles. Margaret is a girl aching to become a woman, while Barbara, who’s been estranged from her fundamentalist Christian parents since marrying a Jewish man 14 years earlier, is a woman in exile from the girl she used to be.

Get the rest of the story at Slate.