Are you there God? It’s Me Margaret (2023)

Yesterday, I took myself on an artist’s date (the solitary time out for your inner artist) to see the film Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. It’s a school holiday week here in the UK and I expected that going to the pictures to see a film about the precipice of teenhood, the cinema would be filled with pre-teens and their Mums. (I had hoped to take my own daughter, but knew it would have been too hard – a story for another day). I was wrong about the audience. I was one of the youngest there. It was an audience yearning for nostalgia.

That nostalgia was not mine. I am (just) too young to have read the book when it was first published and too British to really understand the Judy Blume phenomenon. I have read that the book is one of the most banned books in the United States and seriously, I have no idea what is so offensive.

Not my nostalgia, but I knew I liked two of the actors and I wanted to spend an afternoon in the cinema.

The film starts with the sense of one of those endless childhood summers, spent with other children, outdoors, eating sweets. There is always one summer that marks the end of innocence. If Margaret had been a boy she would go hunting for a dead body. But for her, change is marked by a new car and boxes in the apartment. That sense of freedom and belonging was doomed.

Hey God, “Please don’t let New Jersey be too horrible.”

My family moved when I was around Margaret’s age. Maybe I could have done with that film then; an acknowledgement of the dislocation, of the confusing newness. I was ready to empathise. Besides I’ve always been a fan of the coming of age movie.

Are you there God? is about the messy middle ground of the pre-teen. Not seen as cute anymore, so desperate to be at the next stage – which surely must be boys and bras. But for Margaret it is also God, a recognition that girls think about the big issues too. For me, this was a time marked by my sometimes cringey earnestness in working out how to be good.

The film deals with the race to change with a deft touch. “I must, I must, I must increase my bust”. These moments are not played purely for laughs. The exercises are silly. Maybe, the girls are silly. But they are children so it is o.k. to be silly – it is not o.k. to mock them.

As with all coming of age movies, there are Mean Girls ™ . Surely by now, with all the cautionary tales of meanness, girls could just side-step this trap? But the reason for the pettiness and jealousy is so often over-looked so that it is only ever a character flaw. Are you there God? doesn’t make the reason explicit but it is there: the need to be noticed by boys. And why? Because boys look like they offer a freedom, a cachet. Boys can misbehave, tease, get away without working at school, but make money (mowing lawns). But on the other hand, girls must not be too noticeable. And this means self-worth is tied up with where you are on the puberty time-line. Girls live with that dangerous knowledge that you are either too early or too late. You are never just right. (I walked the side of precocious. I knew my body was being ranked and observed, whilst still a child).

Whilst the story is primarily concerned with girlhood, the era (the early 1970s) was a time when womanhood was at a precipice too - twinset and pearls or denim and sandals. Given my middle age, one of the things I loved about this movie was that the mother was given a crisis-ridden story line too. And dealt with it, without neglecting her child or herself. With emotional intelligence and charm, Rachel McAdams as Barbara, shows the pivots motherhood requires: the balance between work and parenting, the identity crisis as mother and daughter. One of her final lines is the satisfying “I don’t want to.”

If I haven’t made it clear yet, I loved this move. There were a couple of moments where I looked through my fingers in anguish at the girls halting steps at friendship and change. But it was deftly and sweetly handled. And it had a pitch perfect sound track. (Note to self, do not sing along in a cinema).