She brought the family acting gene with her when she started working on movie sets at age five and began taking direction from the likes of Steven Spielberg. But apparently she paid attention too.
Because Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut is a winner, a heartfelt, energetic, audience-friendly comedy set in the world of roller derby competition.
Whip It is a coming-of-age tale, a mother-daughter story, a female bonding dramedy, and a sports flick about an underdog on an underdog team. With a screenplay by roller-derby athlete Shauna Cross — based on her own novel, Derby Girl — it’s the first mainstream movie about the sport since 1972’s Kansas City Bomber with Raquel Welch.
Juno’s Ellen Page stars as Bliss Cavendar, a 17-year-old waitress in the small town of Bodeen, Texas, going through the motions of entering Little Miss Sunshine-like beauty pageants while wishing she could find her bliss somewhere other than on the pageant circuit.
But, obedient daughter that she is, she cooperates with her highly motivated, mail-carrier mother, played by Marcia Gay Harden, while her dad, Daniel Stern, notices her lack of interest in the pageants but keeps his observation to himself.
Bliss thinks she just might have found her path when she accidentally discovers the spectator sport of female roller derbying in nearby Austin.
The local team that she comes to know is the worst team in the league, the Hurl Scouts, coached by Andrew Wilson (older brother of Owen and Luke). Intrigued, Bliss brushes up on her skating, lies about her age, and tries out for the team.
The coach is impressed that she’s so naturally fast, even though the sport would appear to be far too violent for her small stature and ladylike demeanor. But she makes the team because she’s small and speedy, two useful attributes given derby strategy, and she takes the name, “Babe Ruthless.”
That means living a double life for the rest of the season, as she somehow manages to keep her switch from runway to roller rink a secret from her parents.
Simultaneoulsy, the newly liberated Bliss embarks on a new romance with a local musician, an indie rocker played by Landon Pigg.
Director Barrymore (she also served as an executive producer) gets solid performances from not only principals Page and Harden, who are splendid, but Kristen Wigg as a teammate, Juliette Lewis as a rival, Alai Shawkat as Bliss’s best friend, and improvising Jimmy Fallon as the derby announcer. And the presence of Stern, also fine, brings to mind another delightful movie that this one resembles structurally and sometimes tonally, 1979’s Breaking Away, the bicycle racing movie in which Stern made his movie acting debut the year before Barrymore made hers.
Barrymore doesn’t make Bliss’s immediately demonstrated skill in the rink all that persuasive, and doesn’t really try to convey the effect of all the game violence on the players. But her coverage of the game action is fine, she nicely captures the teammate camaraderie, she renders Austin a virtual character without overdoing the tourist shots, and her celebration of female empowerment registers without preachiness.
Moreover, the echoes of her own wunderkind story, her relationship with her own mother, and her high-profile coming of age lend the film a ripe resonance.
Is Drew Barrymore just dabbling behind the camera? Too early to tell, but it would seem not: she just may be a real director.
This charming, breezy, and unpretentious winning entertainment has been knowingly whipped together and lovingly crafted. Drew and her crew make quite a debut: Whip It is with it and worth it.
Bill Wine – Celebrity News Service Movie Critic/ AHN
111 minutes
In theaters October 2, 2009
Rating: PG-13, Comedy
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