Short Take: A very solid tale of self discovery

Director: Drew Barrymore (debut)

Screenwriter: Shauna Cross (screenplay and novel)

Cast: Ellen Page (Juno), Drew Barrymore (He’s Just Not That Into You), Marcia Gay Harden (The Mist, Mystic River), Juliette Lewis (Starsky and Hutch), Kristen Wiig (Extract, Adventureland), Daniel Stern (Bushwhacked)

Length: 1h 51m

Synopsis: Bliss (Page), a 17 year old high school girl living in rural Texas, is just trying to get through life as uneventfully as possible, enduring the normal adolescent growing pains that everyone old enough to have had them knows stink. While normally trying to please her mother (Harden) and her obsession with beauty pageants, she one day becomes intrigued by the sport of roller derby. Supported by her ever-faithful best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) she secretly earns a spot on a derby team in Austin, sneaking away at night to practice with 30 year old tough girls called Maggie Mayhem (Wiig), Smashley Simpson (Barrymore), and Iron Maven (Lewis). Her only obstacle becomes keeping these two lives separate, which proves more difficult than she had anticipated.

Analysis: The narrative structure of Whip It is a mixture of a semi-typical sports drama and self-discovery, maturation story. What makes it only a semi-typical sports drama, aside from the fact that the sport of roller derby is hardly ever represented on celluloid, is that unlike films such as Remember the Titans, Major League, Any Given Sunday, or Hoosiers, where we the audience are meant to be emotionally involved with the success or failure of the team we follow (which, here, are the Hurl Scouts), the advancement of the team is for the most part considered an obligatory background story. This leaves Bliss’ character and her personal story as the clear-cut primary focus, much like Daniel E. Ruettiger in Rudy (though not to suggest too strong of a comparison between the actual characters themselves).

Bliss’ maturation is tracked by the same two things that everyone’s is: the unavoidable necessity of experience and the constant reshuffling of priorities. From how to deal with her personal desires being different from her parents’, to boys, to dealing with issues with her best friend, to pushing herself to find her limitations and boundaries, Bliss gets a lot thrown at her at once. And like the lucky ones who are able to take the lessons learned from one aspect and apply them to another, she eventually begins to make progress towards growing as a young woman, a friend, and a daughter. To Barrymore’s credit as a director, and Cross’ as a writer, Bliss is not depicted as an entirely sympathetic figure. We the audience are encouraged to hold her accountable for her actions, all the while keeping in mind the reasons why she chooses to do what she does. This allows us to relate to her and her situation, but also view her objectively. For a movie trying to teach us the difficulties of being a teenage girl, this aspect goes a long way in legitimizing this explication.

It probably should be needless to say that Whip It is a movie with a strong sense of female empowerment, but I shall acknowledge that fact here just for the record. Roller derby, being that it is a contact sport, often likens physical toughness to the fortitude of one’s character or personality. Such distinctions are often based on appearances and impressions, however to the film’s credit it makes sure to dissolve these superficial notions by revealing the factors that go into making these women strong in regards to their personas, such as fearless determination, conviction, temperance, humility, and self-respect. These qualities are of course the same ones that Bliss’ mother’s beauty pageants try to instill in their participants, and who is to say which is a better avenue for each teenage girl. It takes, as noted, experience and trial and error to discover which direction best suites a person, and when headed along any one of those directions they’re liable to reorganize their priorities all the same. Whip It makes the argument that it is best for parents and children to work together when going through these processes, because one or the other doing it alone leads to unfortunate circumstances. That argument is a strong one indeed.

Rating: 7.5