Big Girls Don't Cry...They Get Even Reviews

Rodney Dangerfield once joked about a kid who was so mean he'd glue worms to the sidewalk and watch the birds get hernias. Such is the hernial effort that director Joan Micklin Silver invests in BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY ... THEY JUST GET EVEN, a tepid teenage angst sitcom, in a futile effort to wring some meaning and emotion from Frank Mugavero's shallow and rattleheaded screenplay. Thirteen-year-old Laura Chartoff (Hillary Wolf), a lonely and unloved victim of multiple parental divorces and remarriages, introduces her "modern-day fairy tale ... less simple and with lawyers." Laura lives with her current stepfather, Keith Powers (David Strathairn), an aloof and cold executive, and her frivolous, uncaring mother, Melinda (Margaret Whitton), while her biological father, David (Griffin Dunne), a reserved and unsuccessful artist, estranged from his second wife Barb (Patricia Kalember), is now cohabitating with his flighty young girlfriend Stephanie Miller (Adrienne Shelley), who is pregnant with twins. After a fight with Melinda and Keith, Laura runs away to a lakefront cabin being built by her older stepbrother Josh (Don Futterman). But when Laura spots Keith and Melinda driving up the cabin path, she takes off into the woods. Before long, she's reported missing and the remaining members of her extended family appear at the cabin to aid in the search. In this rustic setting, the family members come to terms with each other, and Laura, realizing that there is no place like home, returns to the cabin and her family, taking Josh's advice that "You can't run away from these people." At one point in the film, when Laura is still on the run from her family, she is taken in by a terminally happy family that sings the "Brady Bunch" theme--and means it. After she regales the children with a tall tale about how her parents were secret agents killed by a foreign power, the Dad (Googy Gress), out of character, tells Laura that he doesn't appreciate being lied to, criticizing her glib attitude. And "glib" is the problem of the entire film. By pitching BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY ... THEY GET EVEN at a passionless sitcom level, writer Frank Mugavero trivializes Laura's problems and undercuts any emotional involvement with the characters. Laura addresses the camera like a pubescent Woody Allen ("My Mom worked all her life to get this shallow") and minimizes viewer empathy by spouting smart-alecky ripostes (confronting her Mom and Keith about a planned trip to Hawaii, she wails, "I hope you choke on poi ... I hope the Don Ho Show really sucks") more appropriate to a thirtysomething character in a James L. Brooks movie than a teenage girl. Mugavero further obscures character development by depicting Laura's step-siblings as television comedy brats (the stuck-up sister, the ten-year-old computer wiz, the cute toddler) with no substance beyond their cliched attributes. When Laura heads for the hills, the members of her extended family relate to one another in a thoroughly vacant, gag-like manner. This film's idea of a joke is everyone crowded around the cabin's bathroom mirror to brush their teeth. The transparency of Mugavero's characters puts a heavy burden on Joan Micklin Silver to elicit energy and feeling out of thin air. And this she does, up to a point. The film is forever in motion, Micklin Silver adding an energetic pace to the film that compensates to some extent for the heavy-handed and obvious screenplay. Micklin Silver (HESTER STREET, CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER) has always been best at subtle relationships and quiet inflections between characters and, once again, she achieves more with a telling glance between David and Barb than any lame witticism ever could. Unfortunately, this forced extraction looks labored. Rather than conveying the whimsical effects of BETWEEN THE LINES and CROSSING DELANCEY, Silver too often descends to a John Hughes mode, recalling more often than not her disastrous LOVERBOY. But without a well-developed screenplay, directorial nuance becomes divorced and empty. Milklin Silver strains and tries her mightiest, but she is striking a match in a vacuum of banality, and banality, in the film world of 1992, rages on like the Black Plague.