Tamara Jenkins – Bitch Flicks

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic.

Remember riding your bike around town? Remember waiting at the ice cream truck, or trying on new looks in front of the mirror, driving aimlessly around with a new license, or just listening to music in your room alone and having multiple epiphanies? ‘Tis the season to come of age. To be forever changed.

I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”?

In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Slums of Beverly Hills

Like many coming of age classics, Slums of Beverly Hills is both semi-autobiographical (for writer-director Tamara Jenkins) and set in the recent past. 90s indie darling Natasha Lyonne plays Vivian Abromowitz, a girl struggling with her dysfunctional family, burgeoning sexuality and uncomfortably large breasts (an unusual teenage girl problem in a genre full of girls praying for big boobs), all while constantly moving between seedy apartments in Beverly Hills as part of her father’s plan to allow her and her brothers to attend prestigious schools. Through the course of the film, Vivian not only has her period and loses her virginity, clear markers of ascent into womanhood, but also realizes sex can be pleasurable and she has a right to demand that it is. She also comes to appreciate her eccentric father (Alan Arkin) for the sacrifices he makes to give his children the best futures possible.

Lesson: Learn to be amused, not afflicted. Practice saying, one day this will all go in my memoir.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, like Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mermaids, stars Winona Ryder back when she was the patron saint of “weird girls” who liked to wear black and didn’t talk much in class. Her unfortunately named character, Dinky, is a social outcast who prefers animals to her peers, who constantly taunt and torture her and disappoints her adoptive mother by rejecting feminine clothing. Though sometimes its hard to figure out whether Dinky is ostracized for being antisocial or has learned to be antisocial after years of being ostracized. Stuck in a quirky indie film style town where the childhood home of minor celebrity, Roxy Carmichael, is preserved as a museum, Dinky sets out to validate her existence by proving she is Roxy’s long lost daughter.

Lesson: You can’t develop in a vacuum. Spending time alone is valuable, but you really learn who you are from living in the world you have and getting to know the people around you, not from escaping into the world you wish you had.

Lisa’s whole understanding of the world is changed when she watches a woman die in her arms and knows she is partially responsible.

Margaret

Despite hitting some familiar beats (loss of virginity, teacher-student relationship, first encounter with death), Margaret is a very different type of coming of age story, and to my mind, a truer one, than I’ve seen before. As it begins, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a privileged Manhattan teenager, is just coming into her own. She has new and serious opinions about war and politics and passionately argues them in class and charges around the city casually flirting and testing out her new power. When she distracts a bus driver, contributing to a fatal accident, her grief and guilt lead her to seek the driver’s dismissal, which she feels is the only fair consequence. Here, Lisa shows how young she still is, as she doggedly seeks fairness, blind to the interests of the other parties involved and to any other option. She still sees the world as one where the guilty are always punished and the innocent rewarded, and in the moment where she learns things will not work the ways she imagined, she breaks down into a child-like tantrum.

Lesson: Life isn’t fair, it’s really not fair and sometimes there is nothing you can do to make things right.

Dirty Girl

Danielle Edmundson (Juno Temple) thinks God made her purely for sex. Known as the “Dirty Girl” at school for her promiscuity, Danielle looks down on the girls in her class who fuss over their appearance and wish for their Prince Charmings, and uses the boys to prove to herself she has a talent. In Clark (Jeremy Dozier), a shy, gay boy who also sticks out like a sore thumb in their 1980s Oklahoma town, she finds a kindred spirit and the two hit the road, ostensibly to find Danielle’s father, but really to find themselves. Neither Clark nor Danielle have it all figured out. At first she’s the cooler-than-thou mentor who ups his confidence, but in the last moments he’s the one who helps her figure out who she wants to be. Refreshingly, the narrative doesn’t suggest Danielle’s sexual experience is wrong or that she needs to be celibate, but that it’s not the only thing she has or only way people should define her.

Lesson: The people you want in your life are the people who like you for who you are–the people that encourage you to be yourself, but only the best version of yourself.

Danielle appraises her peers and dislikes what she sees.

Haunter

Most teenagers feel bored and trapped at some point, in their small towns or in their families. Haunter twists teenage alienation into a ghost story centered around Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin), another 80s teen, the only person in her family who realizes they’re dead. I chose to read Haunter as coming of age story, despite the fact that the central character will never get any older because it’s all about what Lisa learns. She becomes responsible for her family as the only one that knows the truth and her world becomes a nightmare none of them are aware of, as she is tormented by an murderous spirit. Unlike most alienated teenage girls she also finds herself through taking on the mission of trying to save the family currently living in the house from being the murderer’s next victims. And Lisa also grows in the expected ways for a coming of age heroine, as she goes from blaming her parents for their weaknesses and feeling superior, to allowing herself to understand, and walk in their shoes.

Lesson: Some of your angsty feelings are legitimate, some are self-indulgent. It’s a great skill to know the difference.

Lisa’s clarinet practice fills her time as she remains stuck in her house, the same day repeating endlessly.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

I’ve loved Tamara Jenkins since the first time I saw her film The Slums of Beverly Hills, the 1998 coming-of-age story that put Natasha Lyonne on the map. In addition to being a great movie with top-notch performances by Lyonne, Alan Arkin, and Marisa Tomei, Jenkins shows off her talents as a writer/director willing to show the unsightly, awkward, deeply sad and at once hilarious parts of growing up on the economic margins. The funny moments are made even more so because you don’t seem them coming. As unlikely as you’d be to find a comedic film set in Los Angeles that explores what it means to be a lower-middle-class teenage girl, it would be even more of a rarity to encounter one that delves into what it means to be lower-middle-class adult siblings coping with an estranged parent’s descent into old age and dementia. But that’s just what Jenkins gave us in her 2007 follow-up, The Savages.

If you’re looking to catch up on any Philip Seymour Hoffman films since we lost him earlier this month then that’s reason enough to watch this film—but only one of many. Here’s another: Hoffman plays opposite Laura Linney, who’s always amazing to watch. The two are Jon and Wendy, brother and sister who must wearily confront the necessity of managing the last days of their father’s life. From the first scene we are faced with the reality of the ugliness that is mental and physical decline: we see their father, Lenny, played by Philip Bosco, being castigated by a home health aide, Eduardo, for not flushing the toilet. We then watch as Lenny walks to the bathroom, and then an uncomfortable amount of time passes until Eduardo goes to check on him, only to find that Lenny’s written the word “Prick” on the wall with his feces. From this point forward it is clear that Jenkins is going to put us front and center with the unrelenting intimacy created when family must deal with each other’s shit.

Shortly after the fecal incident we meet Wendy, a woman in her later 30s sitting in a drab office in Manhattan at what can only be a temp job. Like any aspiring artist stuck at a desk, she is surreptitiously pirating postage, photocopying, and miscellaneous office goodies to service her application process to win grant funding; Wendy’s a playwright shopping around a semi-autobiographical work about her childhood called Wake Me When It’s Over. A combination of her life’s accoutrements tells us she’s not where she wants to be: the temp job, Raisin Bran for dinner, a married man whose dog accompanies him to her apartment when he can steal away for a tryst. We very quickly learn that Wendy is not well-practiced at being honest with herself—or those closest to her. She knows the art of telling people the half-truth if it will earn her some sympathy and/or avoid being scrutinized. Wendy gets a call from Arizona to find that her father, Lenny, is “writing with his shit!” (as she exclaims on the phone to Jon), and her overly righteous response tells us even more about her: she wants to rise to the occasion and save the day by caring for her father who never cared for her.

Jon is far more pragmatic and less willing to give too much compassionate ground to a parent whose absence meant he had to step up and doing a lot of the emotional heavy-lifting for his younger sister. Like Wendy, Jon studies theater, but from an academic side as a professor in Buffalo, New York—a contrast that Jenkins beautifully maps onto their personalities, but with a light touch. Wendy and Jon are far from types, and their sibling dynamic is one marked by distant respect for each other without the pretense of fully understanding the other’s choices. They are not entirely free of judgment and resentment, but they demonstrate ease and kindness toward one another far more often than ire. At the core of their tense moments is the central issue they must reckon with: their father has dementia and they must put him in a nursing home and watch him die.

Wendy has fantasies of setting up Lenny in bucolic quarters in the mountains of Vermont where he can live with independence and comfort. But given the level of Lenny’s dementia and their lack of resources, Wendy has to let go of those dreams and settle for the facility Jon selects, which is far more modest, in Buffalo, with costs covered by Medicare. Another director might have tried to seize the dramatic content of such a conflict, as there’s no downplaying the seriousness of what it means to provide comfort and care to the beloved elderly one’s family. Jenkins, however, brings the funny rather than the dour. When Wendy and Jon take Lenny to a high-end facility for an interview to see if his mental acuity meets their criteria for admission, Wendy attempts to coach her father into giving the correct answers to such questions as “What city are you in right now?” That Lenny doesn’t know is sad, but Wendy’s earnestness to help him cheat is, somehow, delightfully absurd. Jon gets annoyed at his sister, but recognizes the difficulty she’s having with the situation and gently lets her be.

When the inevitable does happen, and Wendy and Jon are free of the obligation that brought them together in a shared purpose, they quietly return to their lives. As is often the case in real life, there is no redemption in their father’s death. Jenkins does give us a kind of postscript wherein Wendy and Jon are still themselves, still trying to do the work that defines them, but they are somehow lighter after having endured Lenny’s illness and death. For one thing, they both make progress moving ahead in ways they were previously stalled (I know that’s vague but I don’t want to spoil too much). Most importantly, though, they have arrived as siblings who want to stay connected even without the anchor of obligation; rather than need each other to fit an idea of family, they just want each other to be happy.

Tag: Tamara Jenkins

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

The Quiet Love of Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in ‘The Savages’