MOVIE REVIEW: 'Whip It'

From today's Oregonian....

I can offer no higher praise for "Whip It" than the following: This terrific little flick feels a little like my all-time favorite sports movie, 1979's "Breaking Away," only with roller-derby instead of bike racing as the sport.

I don't think this is remotely accidental. Both movies are comedy-dramas about smart teens embracing offbeat athletic pursuits as they try to escape their small towns. Both movies are shot in a low-key, unpretentious style, and are as fascinated with failure and human comedy as they are with the Big Game. And "Whip It" director Drew Barrymore just goes ahead and makes the parallels explicit by casting "Breaking Away"'s guitar-strumming dork, Daniel Stern, as the father of her protagonist, Bliss (Ellen Page).

Bliss is a meek 17-year-old alterna-dork languishing in Bodeen, Texas. She favors thrift-store combat boots and a Stryper t-shirt that she wears, you know,  ironically. She works at a kitschy BBQ joint with her best friend (Alia Shawkat). Her blue-collar family loves her dearly, but her postal-worker mom (Marcia Gay Harden) keeps shoving Bliss onto the pageant-circuit stage.

Bliss' journey into quiet desperation is suddenly derailed when a bunch of ferocious, tattooed roller-derby women roll into the Austin thrift store she's patronizing and slap a DIY flyer on the counter. Bliss goes to a match -- and the sight of women strapping on pads, taking on nicknames like "Bloody Holly," rejecting the conventions of polite society, and turning into awesomely foul-mouthed warriors promptly blows her mind.

Bliss joins the worst team in the league, the Hurl Scouts, but tells her folks she's getting special SAT tutoring. What could possibly go wrong?

I loved this movie. It put a big grin on my face, and I think it was partially a grin of relief. "Whip It" is funny, joyful and humane. It gives women actual dialogue to say (and lets them kick ass with their real, imperfect bodies) instead of just having them dither about boys for a couple of hours. It understands the subculture it covers -- a rarity. And while it takes the structure of a sports movie, in execution it refutes several of the stupid lies Hollywood usually tells us in rom-coms and sports flicks. There's a lot of "victory in failure" in "Whip It," and no character quite fits into a strict category -- e.g, Harden's pageant-mom is also a postal worker who's funny and tough and caring and nuanced and sneaks a cigarette every once in a while, and at least one roller-derby teammate has grown-up insights that call Bliss on her self-centeredness. And while Bliss enjoys a romance with a cute musician (Landon Pigg), it never becomes the key to her identity.

In a movie full of pleasant surprises, maybe the most pleasant is how confident Drew Barrymore is as a director. Adapting the young-adult novel by Shauna Cross (who also wrote the screenplay), Barrymore films the movie -- and especially the marvelous roller-derby sequences -- in a low-key, take-your-time handheld style with more than a twinge of the '70s to it. She also seems to have digested the nuances, self-effacing humor and underlying psychology of 21st-century roller derby; given that the sport is a careful mix of gladiator combat, sex-positive feminism and indie-rock comic stylings, I can't imagine that was an easy task.

And Barrymore is terrific with her actors, finding moments for even the smallest supporting players. The Hurl Scouts team lineup is like an alt-culture "Dirty Dozen," featuring Barrymore, "SNL" star Kristen Wiig, New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell and hip-hop star Eve -- all of them doing several of their own stunts and reveling in their loserdom, even as the brilliant performance-art plays designed by their coach (Andrew Wilson, brother of Luke and Owen) start moving them up the league ranks. And Juliette Lewis is all snarling rock-and-roll menace as Bliss' chief derby rival.

The benefit of Barrymore's hard work is that you completely understand why a young woman would be entranced by the roller-derby scene, even if you're a boring schmuck completely outside its core demographic. Like me. For teenage girls, I could see "Whip It" being a minor revelation. I hope they see it in droves.
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(111 min., PG-13, multiple locations) Grade: B-plus

'Whip It' (The Oregonian, Oct. 2, 2009)

Comments

[Sam Kaufman]

Drew Barrymore did an awesome job directing Whip It; it was a lot of fun to watch -- made me want to go watch a roller derby match

[Jeremy Bastow]

This movie is great! It's actually entertaining to watch because it can happen in real life. It moved me so much... It proves how tough women can be. I wonder if there's any place in the world where people still play this sport. I would watch and support my girl whenever she plans on playing. I'm sure she'll wanna try it. Well, I have much more to say, but I think I'll just make a review out of it too! All in all, this movie is a 10/10 for me. :D