Margaret has her doubts about the family’s good fortunes.
It’s eerily like the American dream, and almost as though the film has begun at the end. Margaret’s mother (Rachel McAdams) will be able to quit her job and become a housewife. Margaret’s father (Benny Safdie) has been promoted, so they can finally afford a house with a big lawn on a nice street.
Her doting grandmother (Kathy Bates with statement hair) immediately blabs the news that Margaret’s parents are waiting to break: the family are moving to New Jersey. When we meet Margaret, she’s back in New York City after a fun-packed summer spent at camp. It helps that the book’s heroine, 11-year-old Margaret, is played with endearing reserve and self-doubt by Abby Ryder Fortson. The result, thank goodness, is lovely: tender, funny, at points very moving, and full of precise and careful performances. Now, the novel that Blume long prevented from being made into a film has finally received the big-screen treatment. Periods, sex, death, bullying: these are things that happen, Blume’s books gently warned – but they can be managed, and here are some examples of how. The book was loved by its young readers for its humour and cosy relatability but it was doing something radical, too: exposing the damper, more shameful realities of being a tween for what they really were – nothing to be ashamed of at all.
It’s been more than 50 years since the publication of Judy Blume’s seminal coming-of-age novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
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