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Flipped
(2010)
Directed by
Rob Reiner
Review by
Zach Saltz
Posted - 9/26/10
The tragedy of first love is that when we
experience it, it isn’t merely feelings of romantic
attraction, but a kind of idolization. The other
person’s shortcomings are completely hidden from view, and
only their best and purest features are visible to the eye.
They embody everything that is right with the world, and
when they are gone, there is palpable emptiness. When
the ecstasy of first love invariably wears off, it isn’t
just the person that is lost forever, but the perception
that the world can be perfectly right with the simple
glimmer of an eye.
As Rob Reiner’s
Flipped
begins, we learn that 13-year-old Juli Baker (Madeline
Carroll) has been in love with her neighbor, Bryce Loski (Callan
McAuliffe), since the moment she first saw him in the second
grade. She thinks his eyes are dazzling, and finds any
reason to be close to him. She even leans forward in
her seat in class to smell the back of his head (as Roger
Ebert astutely points out in his review of the film, you
cannot truly love someone unless you love the way they
smell). Bryce is that embodiment of perfection for
Juli. But for Bryce, Juli has been little more than a
pesky annoyance for most of his life, and he will stop at
nothing to get her off his back.
That is, until they both reach the eighth
grade, when Bryce suddenly stops and realizes that Juli may
be the most beautiful creature he’s ever seen, while Juli
realizes there may be more important things to do in life
than ogle at the unresponsive neighbor boy, such as climbing
up the giant sycamore tree at the end of the block, or
learning about scientific theories of perpetual motion.
For years, Bryce shrugged off Juli’s obvious signs of
affection, but now, things have flipped and he can’t get her
out of his mind – precisely at the moment she couldn’t care
less about him.
What separates
Flipped
from the myriad other preteen
coming-of-age movies is that the film curiously shies away
from any real romance between the two leads. We tend
to forget that in eighth grade, love is more of an abstract
idea and fleeting feeling than a tangible concept; Juli only
loves Bryce because he is everything that is right with the
world, and when he acts in ways that are hurtful to her or
her family (even if he does so unknowingly), that ideal of
perfection is lost. Bryce knows he suddenly likes Juli
very much, and not just because she is developing breasts;
but what he doesn’t understand is why he should care about
the very same person he has strategically been hiding from
for the last six years of his life. There is a revealing
moment toward the end of the film when Juli realizes that,
even though she’s been in love with him forever, she can’t
recall a time when the two of them actually shared a real
conversation. There aren’t even any first kisses
trumped up by ostentatious background music in the movie,
which is a small miracle for this genre.
Another
interesting component of the film is Bryce and Juli’s
families, which, though neighbors, are vastly different.
Bryce’s father (Anthony Edwards) is a chauvinistic
know-it-all who has little patience for the kooks across the
street. Bryce’s grandfather (John Mahoney, in a role
not too distant from Martin Crane from
Frasier)
takes an immediate liking to Juli, and tries to indiscreetly
lead his grandson toward her. Juli’s father (Aidan
Quinn) is a “dreamer” who cannot afford to tidy up the front
of the family’s house until Juli takes action herself.
With the exception of the Edwards character, who is too
broadly drawn, the presence of the families is a pleasant
reminder that parents and relatives in coming-of-age stories
needn’t be relegated to farce.
If I’m making
Flipped
sound too serious or downtrodden, know
that it is neither of those things. This is a bright,
happy, upbeat film with near-constant stream of late 1950s
hits filling the soundtrack. The film is set in 1963
but is not terribly nostalgic, except in the sense that if
the film were set in 2010, neither Bryce nor Juli would
likely be as timid about approaching each other (cell phones
and Facebook have virtually eliminated the awkwardness of
asking someone out for a date for the first time) or as
immune to the pressures of teenage sexual activity.
Indeed, this is a film that includes a pageant auctioning
boys off to giddy girls in the audience – and the furthest
any of the boys and girls “get” with each other is one giant
group date over homemade lunch in the cafeteria. That
makes Flipped
a sweet and pleasant diversion from
the typical hard-edged and brainless teen melodramas of
today.
Rating:
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