Movie Review: "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" (Marielle Heller, 2015)

TORTURED RECOLLECTIONS by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Bel Powley and Kristen Wiig star in Ms. Heller’s new movie.  Photo ©Sony Pictures Classics

In the most memorable scene of Marielle Heller’s 1970s-set film “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” the film’s sixteen-year-old heroine, Minnie (Bel Powley), drops acid.  She does it right after having sex with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), who seems pitiful indeed compared to Minnie’s sudden vision—her small feet rising a few inches from the bed as her arms sprout glittering, phoenix-like wings.

            That image is confident, exultant—Minnie is basking in the glow of her ascendant desires.  Yet there is something childish and cartoon-like about her imagined feathery appendages.  Throughout the movie, Minnie tackles trials that would traumatize adults (betrayal, drug use, rape).  But she is still, as the title reminds us, a girl, and her “lover” happens to be a grown man and a child molester.

            With a dopey grin and a cheesecake mustache, Monroe looks less like a lothario than a dull-witted, slimy slug.  He sleeps with Minnie countless times, and she convinces herself that she loves him.  “Don’t you feel like you’re being taken advantage of?” Minnie’s friend Kimmie (Madeleine Waters) asks her over the phone.  Minnie’s only response is injured silence.

            Watching “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is not a pleasant experience.  Every time Monroe exploits Minnie, she’s pushed deeper into emotional turmoil; late in the film, she even finds herself wandering through the streets of San Francisco, perched on the precipice of homelessness.  Like so many American independent films, this one (which is based on a graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner) instinctively zeroes in on myriad bleak outcomes before winging its way toward optimism. 

            Throughout the film, detailed cartoons of Minnie’s erotic fantasies rove, float, and dance across the screen.  Yet in the end, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” takes an almost puritanical view of sex.  Predators like Monroe may haunt the streets and headlines of America, but the movie uses him not as a character, but as a crutch designed to appease viewers who might be aghast at a film that portrayed sex as something other than deviance.

            In other words, moviegoers probably would have been more shocked if the story had focused on an unexploited, well-adjusted teenage girl discovering her sexuality.  So while Minnie’s late revelation that she doesn’t need male companionship to be happy (“Maybe no one will ever love me,” she declares with an air of confident acceptance) is heartening, it carries a whiff of the monastic because the film is so determined to associate sex with sickos like Monroe.