Your correspondent has gotten a little behind on her moviegoing, and had to catch up with Whip It midweek at a Culver City multiplex. By the time I’d paid $11.50 and sat through commercials for Sprint, Honda and Coca-Cola, not to mention a preview in which Meryl Streep and George Clooney are the voices of some fox-like creatures that appear to have escaped from a taxidermist (was I hallucinating?), I was getting testy about the movie-going experience in general, and really needed Whip It to be good.
Ever since A&E aired its reality show Roller Girls, about the riot grrrl-reincarnation of roller derby as practiced in Austin, Texas, I’ve been waiting for a movie version, but after seeing this, I think A&E may have done it better.
The real life version showed how the alterna-derby gives women with everyday jobs an outlet for their competitiveness, anger and rowdiness; it’s like a self-realization workshop for part-time badasses.
The movie is more of a teen coming-of-age story, in which a small-town 17-year-old (Ellen Page) falls in love with the derby girls’ attitude on a trip to Austin and from then on, defies her parents to sneak out and become a star of the team, which wears tiny girl scout uniforms and is called The Hurl Scouts.
At first, it makes a lot of sense; at home, she’s stuck humoring her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) by competing in lame beauty pageants; in her secret life, she gets to wear eyeliner and a crash helmet, adopt the name Babe Ruthless, and skate like a banshee while also falling in love with a skinny musician (Landon Pigg) in a Kinks-like band. But eventually, conflicts intensify and choices have to be made, and you worry that Ruthless may be throwing her life away. Derby just makes more sense as a part-time outlet than a life choice; I think it’s coolest as a game for free adult women.
Drew Barrymore plays one of the beautiful, crazy-ass skaters, Smashley Simpson, and she also directs the movie, which is another reason I was rooting for it. Drew is one of those fun, awesome girls that everyone wishes they had for a best friend, and after seeing the movie, I can still say that about her. She seems never more ecstatic than in the scene where she screams ‘Food fight!’ to launch a messy free-for-all. But in between the bitchin’ skate scenes, there are quite a few that seem off, or fall flat, or try for a laugh and just get crickets. Ellen Page is a natural at being smart, clutzy and ironic, but fierce and athletic she isn’t, and her performance here makes Juno and its director Jason Reitman look that much better.
The real news is the return of Juliette Lewis, who’s all sassy swagger and sultry grit as Iron Maven, a skater on an opposing team who wants to win even more than Ruthless does, and convincingly asserts that she’s earned it. Juliette takes the movie just where it needs to go; she’s so badass that it’s a shame she wasn’t cast as rocker Joan Jett in the upcoming biopic The Runaways (that role went to the subdued-seeming Kristen Stewart of Twilight). Also bringing some credibility to the derby is the seriously athletic Zoe Bell, who played the car hood-riding stuntwoman in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, which was also set in Austin.
But unlike that pic, which featured abundant location shooting, Whip It was lured elsewhere by tax incentives, and while it features a few iconic exteriors like South Congress Ave., the Alamo Drafthouse and Waterloo Records, it doesn’t really feel like it inhabits this essential location.
In the end, Whip It is messy and uneven, but also appealing and human. The hell of it all is, sometimes that has to be enough. And for me, it beats a movie about furry foxes, sight unseen.
WHIP IT. Released by Fox Searchlight. Directed by Drew Barrymore. Written by Shauna Cross, based on her novel “Derby Girl.”
Ever since A&E aired its reality show Roller Girls, about the riot grrrl-reincarnation of roller derby as practiced in Austin, Texas, I’ve been waiting for a movie version, but after seeing this, I think A&E may have done it better.
The real life version showed how the alterna-derby gives women with everyday jobs an outlet for their competitiveness, anger and rowdiness; it’s like a self-realization workshop for part-time badasses.
The movie is more of a teen coming-of-age story, in which a small-town 17-year-old (Ellen Page) falls in love with the derby girls’ attitude on a trip to Austin and from then on, defies her parents to sneak out and become a star of the team, which wears tiny girl scout uniforms and is called The Hurl Scouts.
At first, it makes a lot of sense; at home, she’s stuck humoring her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) by competing in lame beauty pageants; in her secret life, she gets to wear eyeliner and a crash helmet, adopt the name Babe Ruthless, and skate like a banshee while also falling in love with a skinny musician (Landon Pigg) in a Kinks-like band. But eventually, conflicts intensify and choices have to be made, and you worry that Ruthless may be throwing her life away. Derby just makes more sense as a part-time outlet than a life choice; I think it’s coolest as a game for free adult women.
Drew Barrymore plays one of the beautiful, crazy-ass skaters, Smashley Simpson, and she also directs the movie, which is another reason I was rooting for it. Drew is one of those fun, awesome girls that everyone wishes they had for a best friend, and after seeing the movie, I can still say that about her. She seems never more ecstatic than in the scene where she screams ‘Food fight!’ to launch a messy free-for-all. But in between the bitchin’ skate scenes, there are quite a few that seem off, or fall flat, or try for a laugh and just get crickets. Ellen Page is a natural at being smart, clutzy and ironic, but fierce and athletic she isn’t, and her performance here makes Juno and its director Jason Reitman look that much better.
The real news is the return of Juliette Lewis, who’s all sassy swagger and sultry grit as Iron Maven, a skater on an opposing team who wants to win even more than Ruthless does, and convincingly asserts that she’s earned it. Juliette takes the movie just where it needs to go; she’s so badass that it’s a shame she wasn’t cast as rocker Joan Jett in the upcoming biopic The Runaways (that role went to the subdued-seeming Kristen Stewart of Twilight). Also bringing some credibility to the derby is the seriously athletic Zoe Bell, who played the car hood-riding stuntwoman in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, which was also set in Austin.
But unlike that pic, which featured abundant location shooting, Whip It was lured elsewhere by tax incentives, and while it features a few iconic exteriors like South Congress Ave., the Alamo Drafthouse and Waterloo Records, it doesn’t really feel like it inhabits this essential location.
In the end, Whip It is messy and uneven, but also appealing and human. The hell of it all is, sometimes that has to be enough. And for me, it beats a movie about furry foxes, sight unseen.
WHIP IT. Released by Fox Searchlight. Directed by Drew Barrymore. Written by Shauna Cross, based on her novel “Derby Girl.”
