Babyteeth
“Do you have a crush on me?” “Obviously.” “But do you, like, like-like me?” “I don’t want to hurt your feelings.” “Then don’t.”
In the mouths of sensitive actors, the dialogue crackles with vulnerability and humor. Rita Kalnejais’ script for “Babyteeth” (based on her stage play) is full of such moments. It’s one of those screenplays where every character has their own rhythm. No two characters sound alike.
As a result, the film even though the plot is familiar bristles with spontaneity; with surprise and humor; with instances of deep emotion and truth. “Babyteeth” is director Shannon Murphy’s first feature film, and what an impressive debut it is. You may think you know where it’s going and maybe you’re right. But how it gets there is quite different.
“Babyteeth” is ostensibly about a dying teenage girl who falls in love for the first time but what it’s about isn’t necessarily what it actually is. What it actually is is a story about four people dealing with unexpectedness in their lives, be that cancer or loss or love. Sometimes they deal with that unexpectedness gracefully; sometimes not so much.
They freak out, throw tantrums, push each other away; they bumble things up, apologize badly, self-medicate (or overmedicate). Throughout all this runs an underlying sense of people grappling with life’s intangibles: Life’s transitory experiences and textures; the lines between lines that make life worth living.
When Milla (Eliza Scanlen) meets Moses (Toby Wallace) on a train platform there’s an instantaneous connection between them that seems to defy explanation. There are barely any words exchanged back-and-forth but there’s an undeniable magnetic pull between them nonetheless: She wears a school uniform and has long blonde hair (we soon learn it’s a wig); he’s older than her and an unkempt, loping mess of limbs with hair in a rat’s tail and a scabbed face.
But he attaches himself to her with an easy, disarming closeness that feels like the opposite of a threat. When her nose starts bleeding, he rushes forward to help her deal with it and she is overwhelmed by him. Because of how Murphy shoots this initial interaction, and because of how the actors played it, I had no idea what was going to happen next.
Was Moses up to no good? He asks for money at first but when she hands him a bill he tells her it’s too much. Milla cuts school and spends the day wandering around with Moses, who seems to have no home; from the looks of things, he might be high on something. She is entranced by him completely.
Moses is brought to dinner at Milla’s house, a highly protected girl with one milk tooth. Her parents, a psychiatrist Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and an ex-classical pianist Anna (Essie Davis), don’t know what to do. Henry is more accepting than his wife who says, “Lucky for everyone I forgot I’d taken a Zoloft when I took the two Xanax.”
Milla rebels against her parents’ fears about Moses, but it is not as simple as that: She is still a child; she goes to school and scares the other children with her cancer; she has never dealt with boys before. She is both little kid and rebelling-teenager at once. “He’s not afraid of anything,” she tells her mother about Moses. “That boy has problems,” Anna says. “So do I!” Milla replies. When he breaks into their house in the middle of the night to rob them, she defends him.
“Babyteeth” avoids pretty much every cliche you might expect from this material: Henry and Anna do not forbid Milla to see Moses; Moses is indeed her first love ridiculous or no; Milla might not live until adulthood and they don’t want to deny her that experience. There comes a moment when Henry and Anna stand in their kitchen watching Milla wrestle with Moses in the backyard, and Anna sighs, “This is the worst possible parenting I can imagine.”
“Babyteeth” is really a quartet (there are a couple peripheral characters who feel tacked on). It’s not just Milla’s story: The screen belongs equally to Henry, Anna, Mille hers being such an open face and Moses. Mendelsohn has such a kind face but it’s kindness soured by some kind of philosophical realism; within that realism lives tenderness upon tenderness upon tenderness.
Davis, who gave my favorite performance of 2014 in “The Babadook,” is hilarious and poignant: She’s obviously addicted to pills but what she’s really running from is the ghosts of her thwarted past and the ghosts of a future without her daughter. Together, with frayed nerves and exhausted resources, Mendelsohn and Davis create an extremely real long-married couple.
But the real laurels go to Eliza Scanlen who has had quite a year between “Sharp Objects” and “Little Women” (and now “Emma”). In both “Little Women” and “Emma” she played secondary characters but what she does in this movie proves she can carry one. When Milla stares at the back of Moses’ neck, Scanlen isn’t just showing us Milla’s first experience of desire; what’s on Eliza’s face is a kind of quiet grateful awe that this boy is here, miraculously, that she gets to feel these new feelings. It’s an amazing performance. And Wallace so open so accessible nothing less than wonder he has that rare gift personal charisma playing Moses it not being calculated get something return but real deal he truly charismatic
The girl with the combination of teenage and illness (mostly cancer) in films is such a common thing that it has become cliché a hackneyed device used to make the main male character change. “Love Story” (1970) was followed by any number of imitations: “A Walk to Remember,” “Garden State,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”.
But that’s not how “Babyteeth” works. Cancer is the dark cloud under which these characters live. They are all mourning their own lives, none of them well. Both Milla and Moses transform; not because Milla has cancer, therefore she is supposed to be inspirational, but because love changes people.
“Babyteeth” reminded me twice of Martha Coolidge’s 1983 movie “Valley Girl,” where a kid from the Valley falls for a kid from Hollywood. Designed as a culture clash movie, it’s really about what it feels like when you’re falling head over heels for someone for the first time. She said: “I felt from old movies that the most important thing that you can do in a movie is to play wanting. It isn’t actually the getting of the person that is hot on the screen. It’s the wanting. It’s the electricity. The eye contact, the reflecting of each other that people do. This is the theory of electricity and wanting.”
“Babyteeth” knows this theory so well when love arrives, it really does seem miraculous, and anyone who tells you different just hasn’t been paying attention at all.
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