The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
And this is all before even thinking about what happened last week on The O.C. Indeed, in a pop-culture obsessed world marketed ever younger, it is hard being a teen.
And, as the new girl-power flick The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants attests, it is even harder to be a privileged, beautiful 16-year-old, even with an ever-elusive perfect pair of jeans.
We’ll ignore for now the fact that four puberty-ridden girls sharing the same pair of unwashed jeans is so far beyond the pale that even Purell couldn’t solve the problem, and turn our attention to the girls that fit behind the infamous hygiene challenged, frequent flyer loaded pants.
The aforementioned “Sisterhood” consists of the luminous yet shy Lena (Alexis Bledel playing not so far from her Rory on Gilmore Girls), the edgy, Avril-wannabe Tibby (Amber Tamblyn, hitting all the right notes), the bold and beautiful Bridget (future Maxim cover girl Blake Lively) and the “full-figured” Carmen (a feisty America Ferrera).
Whilst on a shopping trip, the girls find a pair of second hand jeans that “magically” fit each of them perfectly. This impossibility is automatically excused, however, when Carmen actually points out the scientific hooey of this conceit. With the girls splitting up for the summer to various teen movie locales, they decide to form a sisterhood to spiritually bind them together, revolving around the pants.
In creating the rules for the sisterhood, one of the girls suggests that they avoid washing the jeans for fear that the necessary laundry time will somehow release it of its “magic”. Each girl will keep the pants for one week, at which point they will be FedEx’ed to the next girl on the schedule.
So to recap, the already used jeans will be worn for a week, not washed and then shipped across the world, only to have the process repeated eight times. Someone really needs to introduce the girls to a little thing called Fabreeze.
We then follow the girls on their travels, with their life-lessons waiting readily in the wings. Lena and Bridget’s stories suffer from short shrift, as they are relegated to exotic locales (Greece for Lena, a soccer camp in Mexico for Bridget) only to fall in love with cute boys. Their struggle is documented with the sort of depth that only a three line narration can provide.
The heart of the film falls to the tales of Carmen and Tibby. Latin Carmen travels to South Carolina to spend the summer with her waspish father who surprises her with a new family so conservative and white that the camera can barely keep it all in focus. Her difficulty in adapting to the new clan is a “been there, done that” scenario of trite proportions.
Carmen’s real struggle is her inability to tell her father how angry she is that he has never been around for her. This leads to the most heart-wrenching scene in the film, when she finally calls him on his bad parenting. This subject matter is far more mature that the simple boy problems of Bridget and Lena and showcases a sophistication that could have uplifted the film had it not been aimed squarely at the hearts of 12 year old girls with way too much disposable income.
Tibby’s story wants desperately to go down the fast and furious road of clichÃ?©, but is saved by some effective acting by Amber Tamblyn and her co-star Jenna Boyd.
Tibby spends her summer making a “suckumentary” about the workers and customers of the Walmart like department store that she is working at. When she saves the life of a precocious leukemia-suffering child, the girl attaches herself to Tibby, becoming her assistant.
Tibby’s hard edges and sarcasm are slowly washed away as she becomes more emotionally attached to this girl. Kudos go to the Joan of Arcadia star for a hospital bed breakdown so believable the sounds of crying could be heard throughout the theater.
And to that end, the film is successful; it will make women and girls alike, cry. And for the most part, the film also succeeds in showing that the lives of beautiful, over-privileged sixteen year olds can be hard, given the right amount of movie logic.
While parts of the film offer welcome insight into the rough truth of growing up, too much of the film is rooted in the manipulation of its audience, and the tugging of heartstrings.
This is all good for the teen audience, but it is just not enough to recommend the film to anyone beyond fans of the Ann Brashares novel of which the film is based and anyone who doesn’t mind ignoring blatant wardrobe mismanagement and sublimely bad hygiene.
Grade: C+
