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.

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