Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page) is a 17-year-old student and waitress whose galvanising mother Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden) is pressing her to become a beauty queen and steering her away from the grungier bohemianism that’s her more natural realm, with her articulate cynicism and muted yearning for a bigger life than her small Texas town can provide. On a shopping trip to Austin
The team’s cranky coach Razor (Andrew Wilson) has been encouraging them to strive for higher goals, having written a book of plays none of them has bothered to learn, and Bliss’s skill finally energises them to try. Bliss catches eyes and becomes the sport’s new poster girl, earning the enmity of some, especially her champion rival Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis, in a welcome role), and she also tries to sustain her new lifestyle under her parents’ noses, an effort that eventually leads to some bruising confrontations as everyone’s hidden lives and frustrated passions are revealed.
The directorial debut of Drew Barrymore, Whip It is a curiously maddening work, a cross-breed of indie-genre domestic dramedy and rite-of-passage tale detailing a conflict between ideals of Americana, and a comedy-laced sports yarn resembling a chick-power Slap-Shot. Barrymore’s sleek, confident storytelling rejects the stilted deadpan-isms of the likes of Juno and Sunshine Cleaning, and the archly contrived quality of Little Miss Sunshine, and yet she patently wants her film to be a more nuanced, expressive, personal take on what is in many essentials a remake of Bring It On. Marvellous little moments, like Bliss’s beatifically filmed underwater snogging session with her cute but middling and erratic rocker boyfriend Oliver (Landon Pigg), festoon the film, and imbue it with a creative, romantic warmth that’s become altogether rare in a lot of contemporary Hollywood films.
Whip It is significantly hamstrung by Shauna Cross’s script, adapted from her novel, leaning on arcs that are so familiar, with the regulation number of bust-ups and reconciliations, bitchy enemies and unreliable boyfriends, problems with officialdom and second-act conflicts and emotional third-act reunions all coming on cue, that, at least in terms of story construction, the movie often seems a by-rote product of a screenwriting class. The conceit of playing the beauty pageant circus and the brittle, paranoid chic of the middle-class midwest so baldly against the down-and-dirty liberation of the roller derby, is facile. I could never quite forget the fact that I had seen so much of the film before in the context of other films.
And yet Cross describes believable nuances and intricacies in initially stock figures like the hyper-critical uptight mother and the vengeful Iron Maven, and shows a keen understanding of the line between irony and snark in terms of humour. Almost every character has a funny or revealing moment, like Razor’s comically intense frustration with his team, Bliss’s best friend Pash (Ali Shawkat) drunkenly making out in the shower with a random guy, or Johnny Rocket (Jimmy Fallon), the derby’s hyper, horny announcer, who wants so desperately to get in the hot-tub with lesbian glamour puss Eva Destruction (Ari Graynor) and her current paramour.
Barrymore’s way with her actors and fluent storytelling, well-judged pace, and openness to absorbing milieu, are all certifiably admirable for a first-time director. The derby scenes are exciting and coherent, even if leaning hard on Fallon’s announcing to make the play explicable, and the resolution to the sports side of the drama works well. Barrymore acknowledges the campy, sexy side of the sport, but mostly looks for the athleticism and skill required, and she gives herself an amusing role as one of the Hurl Scouts’ most talented but unfortunately hot-headed players. Page, called upon to be so intolerably precocious in Juno and Smart People, is allowed to blossom here, ironically by playing a far less overtly precocious and articulate character – Bliss doesn’t always have a jaggedly funny or wilful comeback, and has to struggle to define herself. Whip It is an entertaining and lovable film, and if it had possessed a little more courage to be individual, like its heroine, might have been a knockout.
