"What Girls Learn" review -- QLIK Message Board

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Date Posted: 14:04:30 10/11/01 Thu
Author: Barbara (who lives in Huntington where this takes place)
Subject: "What Girls Learn" review

In New York Newsday, 10/11/01:

Big Girls Do Cry, Sometimes

A Long Island family faces adversity together

by Diane Werts

Many things that don't deserve a bad rap seem to get one anyway. Long Island ax-cents. Nostlagia. Having a good cry. Being a 13-year-old girl. Films made for the entire family.

That all of these can be immensely satisfying is proven in Showtime's sublime Sunday drama, "WGL," which also gives a good name to letting actors produce their own movies. Scott Bakula, the captain on the new "ST" prequel "Enterprise," does the honors here, and you want to write the guy a blank check for his next effort. Though this one starts slowly, its measured pace lures us deep into the lives of a fractured family that is only beginning to heal when it's tested again as the mother battles breast cancer.

Tear-jerker? Another bad rap. Lots of us could stand to let some emotions flow these days. Sunday's honest sentiment may open the valves for viewers suffering the same anxiety as 13-year-old "loner" Tilden, who as her afflict4ed mama says, "Worries about things which we can do so very little about."

Tilden's apprehensive nature immediately seems as distinct as the name bestowed by her Auntie Mame-like single mom, given to declaring "Normal is rather dull." At 15, unaffected actress Alison Pill radiates the face of a real adolescent, down to the eye-rolling attitude and that shocked gape upon encountering emotions that rattle her composure. Pill has wowed us in other daughter roles: as ABC's young Lorna Luft riding the roller coaster of "Life With Judy Garland," and in cable films starring Farrah Fawcett ("Baby") and Sissy Spacek ("Midwives"). She's her mother's child here, too. She embodies the more thoughtful side of Elizabeth Perkins' penetrating personality as a rambunctious soul who talks in French accent for fun, calls her two daughters "loveys" and soaks alongside them in a clawfoot tub.

Then their tight Georgia threesome gets penetrated. Mom meets a suitor who sweeps her so far off her feet, the family lands on Long Island. Here comes the nostalgia part: The sisters struggle to adjust not only to impending puberty and to eager new "dad" Bakula, but also to life in the 1981 Long Island "countryside." Just look at all that open space. (They filmed in Pill's native Ontario."

This isn't a bad metaphor for the space and time in which "What Girls Learn" allows its people and emotions to breathe, cogitate and bloom. Other films may move-move-move with chatty dialogue and busy plotting. Director Lee Rose (she made Stockard Channing's "An Unexpected Family" and Showtime's "A Girl Thing") knows that feelings find their own shape. That could happen as misfit Tilden ponders her attributes in a "conceited poem" for school, or as her more mainstream preteen sister Elizabeth (Tamara Hope) kneels in church to cope with mom's newly discovered condition. It could happen in a moment's passing, in a wink or a nod.

These girls get to the heart of things by quietly thinking, and director Rose find keen ways to observe them doing it. As script writer Karn Leigh Hopkins pares away some characters and incidents from Huntington-raised Karin Cook's self-based source novel, she focuses more intimately on her central foursome. The result serves as more than just the October entry in Showtime's unsung monthly series of Original Pictures for All Ages, more than brownie-point recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. "WGL" stands as a beacon of rich characterization of ordinary people. It illustrates, in deeply felt fashion, how there's nothing "average" about any of us.

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Replies:

Re: "What Girls Learn" review -- Helene, 16:31:44 10/12/01 Fri