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The string of good-to-great comedies Rob Reiner made at the onset of his directing career -- This is Spinal Tap; The Sure Thing; Stand By Me; The Princess Bride; When Harry Met Sally -- remains so impressive, even influential, that a middling one from him strings just a little bit more than a comparable movie from, say, Andy Tennant or Shawn Levy. This may be unfair; expectations should probably not be the same after the likes of North or Rumor Has It, but look at that list again, and then try to imagine a cutesy, overscored coming-of-age movie by the same director. It's not a good feeling, no matter how hard the movie tries for otherwise.
It's not that Flipped, Reiner's new comedy, is utter hackwork. If anything, it feels a touch more personal than his other recent films; he co-wrote the screenplay, adapted from a children's novel by Wendelin Van Draanen, and works with an intimate cast of character actors and unknown kids. There's even a structural playfulness: the agreeable gimmick of two thirteen-year-old neighbors Juli Baker (Madeline Carroll) and Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) sharing the movie's point of view, telling and retelling the story of their seventh-grade courtship. The alternation makes sense, capturing the mercurial, emotional uncertainty of early adolescence: In some episodes, Juli is smitten with Bryce; in others, his feelings stir for her even as he fumbles his way through basic human interaction.
The parallel stories, though, also capture voiceover. A lot of voiceover. Reiner must be preserving narration from Van Draanen's novel, but off the page, with onscreen figures struggling to work in a facial expression without obvious explanation, the technique becomes suffocating and repetitive. It offers Wonder Years-style commentary -- the movie is even set in the sixties, albeit the early sixties rather than that show's more turmoil-friendly period later in the decade -- but, expressed as it is in the voices of thirteen-year-olds rather than adults looking back, their storytelling sounds a bit like faux-wry essays written by actual thirteen-year-old (and not particularly talented ones, judging by some clumsy tense switches). Carroll, playing an earnest, honest girl with no patience for teenage game-playing, at least gets to articulate some actual feelings; poor McAuliffe has to read observations mostly amounting to, "boy, can you believe that?!"
The narration doesn't offer much in the way of good jokes, but it does go a long way toward explaining why, exactly, Juli and Bryce think about each other so much; the movie even admits that they've barely shared a real conversation since meeting as seven-year-olds. This wouldn't matter if they were independently interesting -- it's a movie about first love, not the seeds of a decades-long marriage, at least I hope not -- but Bryce, especially, is too much of a bland everykid to express confusion and heartbreak with any real wit or soul.
Still, the episodic structure does result in some cute vignettes of dawning adolescent awkwardness; the movie at its worst is more genially dopey than cynically manipulative. Subplots about various family and neighborhood tensions make an earnest attempt to bring some gravitas to the light soft-focus comedy. But it's been so long since Reiner deftly mixed these two very compatible genres that the shifts to family drama can feel downright histrionic when they're not weirdly perfunctory. Bryce's father (Anthony Edwards), for example, is a bitter and dismissive man, but Edwards plays him as a cartoonish, pompous jerk; it's up to the voiceover, again, to intimate that he lives with a core of sadness and compromise.
At least his character doesn't come with ready-made hugs and redemption, nor does Bryce's impossibly calm and warm-hearted grandfather (John Mahoney) hog the screen or force too many life lessons. But Flipped still keeps things a little too scrubbed and tidy, even when the story eschews traditional resolution; it's a slice of life told in a sitcom language that Reiner used to have a knack for avoiding. Granted, this is a movie for kids, and as far as those viewing options go, kids could do a lot worse. Reiner, though, should be doing a lot better.
It's not that Flipped, Reiner's new comedy, is utter hackwork. If anything, it feels a touch more personal than his other recent films; he co-wrote the screenplay, adapted from a children's novel by Wendelin Van Draanen, and works with an intimate cast of character actors and unknown kids. There's even a structural playfulness: the agreeable gimmick of two thirteen-year-old neighbors Juli Baker (Madeline Carroll) and Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) sharing the movie's point of view, telling and retelling the story of their seventh-grade courtship. The alternation makes sense, capturing the mercurial, emotional uncertainty of early adolescence: In some episodes, Juli is smitten with Bryce; in others, his feelings stir for her even as he fumbles his way through basic human interaction.
The parallel stories, though, also capture voiceover. A lot of voiceover. Reiner must be preserving narration from Van Draanen's novel, but off the page, with onscreen figures struggling to work in a facial expression without obvious explanation, the technique becomes suffocating and repetitive. It offers Wonder Years-style commentary -- the movie is even set in the sixties, albeit the early sixties rather than that show's more turmoil-friendly period later in the decade -- but, expressed as it is in the voices of thirteen-year-olds rather than adults looking back, their storytelling sounds a bit like faux-wry essays written by actual thirteen-year-old (and not particularly talented ones, judging by some clumsy tense switches). Carroll, playing an earnest, honest girl with no patience for teenage game-playing, at least gets to articulate some actual feelings; poor McAuliffe has to read observations mostly amounting to, "boy, can you believe that?!"
The narration doesn't offer much in the way of good jokes, but it does go a long way toward explaining why, exactly, Juli and Bryce think about each other so much; the movie even admits that they've barely shared a real conversation since meeting as seven-year-olds. This wouldn't matter if they were independently interesting -- it's a movie about first love, not the seeds of a decades-long marriage, at least I hope not -- but Bryce, especially, is too much of a bland everykid to express confusion and heartbreak with any real wit or soul.
Still, the episodic structure does result in some cute vignettes of dawning adolescent awkwardness; the movie at its worst is more genially dopey than cynically manipulative. Subplots about various family and neighborhood tensions make an earnest attempt to bring some gravitas to the light soft-focus comedy. But it's been so long since Reiner deftly mixed these two very compatible genres that the shifts to family drama can feel downright histrionic when they're not weirdly perfunctory. Bryce's father (Anthony Edwards), for example, is a bitter and dismissive man, but Edwards plays him as a cartoonish, pompous jerk; it's up to the voiceover, again, to intimate that he lives with a core of sadness and compromise.
At least his character doesn't come with ready-made hugs and redemption, nor does Bryce's impossibly calm and warm-hearted grandfather (John Mahoney) hog the screen or force too many life lessons. But Flipped still keeps things a little too scrubbed and tidy, even when the story eschews traditional resolution; it's a slice of life told in a sitcom language that Reiner used to have a knack for avoiding. Granted, this is a movie for kids, and as far as those viewing options go, kids could do a lot worse. Reiner, though, should be doing a lot better.
