Director: Kelly Fremon Craig
Starring:Â Hailee Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner, Kyra Sedgwick, Woody Harrelson, Hayden Szeto, Alexander Calvert
Running Time: 104 Minutes
Rating: 15
Release Date: 30/11/16
A high-school drama about a teen Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) whose life begins to take a spiral downward after her best friend begins to date her older brother. (But honestly, the synopsis, trailer or poster don’t serve this film well)
Young people are treated with such contempt today. We’re accused of being lazy, burying our heads in our phones all the time and generally being blamed and belittled, reducing all that we’re feeling to ‘just being a teenager’. We’re either labelled as yobs or laughed at as smart-assess with no clue what we’re talking about.
Our opinions aren’t validated, our voices aren’t heard enough and in this day and age, we’re the ones who’ll be making positive changes in the future yet we’re not given a chance to prove it. Hell, even when we start making money on youtube it’s treated like it’s not a real job.
So, it would be somebody who generally looks down on the young that would see this film as a frivolous exercise in teen angst and nothing more. As somebody who’s just a couple of years past their teens, I see THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN as something smarter, defter and more heartbreaking than that.
It’s got real complexity and as a classic coming of age drama, it has humour, pathos and buckets of heart. It wears its cliches on its sleeves but delivers where it counts, capturing the beautiful melancholy of growing up.
Kelly Fremon Craig fricking nails it. She understands that the self-loathing and depression of the millennial generation isn’t just ‘being dramatic’, it’s an epidemic.
She gets it all. The exquisite awkwardness, the pained minutiae of day to day life. It feels emotionally tactile and so relatable. Though I’m not in high-school, nor a teenage girl, I recognise everything on screen.
Hailee Steinfeld is incredible. They’d never give an Oscar to a film like this but if they did she’d be a shoe-in. There are moments here that are genuinely quite hard to watch, like the self-loathing of shows like FLEABAG or BOJACK HORSEMAN, there’s genuine empathy to be had here.
You care, even when she’s being a difficult person and making it worse, you want her to be happy. The nuance to her self-hatred resonates loudly in quiet scenes and you see it in every facial expression.
I cried more times than I can remember because each performance felt so real and so honest. Not just the lead but the other characters around her. From the funny, mild-mannered performance of Woody Harrelson as teacher Mr Bruner to awkward film geek Erwin (Hayden Szeto), the cast isn’t flashy or starry but has real talent.
Harrelson is the sneakily wise mentor character and there’s a beautifully understated nature to his relationship with Nadine. Whilst, the relationship between Erwin and Nadine gives the story its minimally romantic charm.
In particular, however, is her brother Darian (Blake Jenner) who’s more than just a jock cliche. His bigger moments towards the end of the film are more than a little heartbreaking and the complex relationship between Nadine, their mother Mona (Kyra Sedgwick), and he is the film’s key strength.
Yet, it’s the little touches that really cement this film for me. The resolutions are simple, vulnerable and touching with the simple difficulty of a text between mother and daughter providing the most poignant ending.
Fremon Craig directs with flair and writes with passion. The jokes land and the complexities of the characters are hidden under layers of arrogance or embarrassment. There’s also great uses of music. I’m a sap for good use of music in film and when To Build a Home kicks in, I was a wreck.
It’s a heartwrenching scene and Steinfeld gives it everything.
Ask me what sort of films I like, apart from Disney/Pixar and Horror/Zombies, I’ll always say the teen high-school genre. In the past few years, we’ve had the likes of THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL, MEAN GIRLS, EASY A, PAPER TOWNS, the list goes on.
To end the year with one as good as this has given me a new film to include in my top three of 2016. This is a genre I have a particular affinity for and they should not be dismissed or demeaned as the darkness and complexity that lies within them aren’t just surface but honest.
I’m sorry but if you want to watch THE DARK KNIGHTÂ a hundred times and tell me it’s a masterpiece, then I have the right to say that THE EDGE OF SEVENTEENÂ is as bad at representing the pain of being young as that is as good at representing the life of a millionaire. As in, not at all.
In the pantheon of great high school teen movies, this is the rallying cry for the disenfranchised twitter generation and I love it to bits.
Verdict
