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How The Edge of Seventeen is a John Hughes Movie for Millennials

The 2016 Canon: How The Edge of Seventeen is a John Hughes Movie for Millennials

Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig tackles contemporary teen angst in the tradition of the man who legitimized it.

This year, along with films like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Elia Kazan's tackling of a John Steinbeck novel with East of Eden, Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, and the iconic 1990 documentary focused on New York City's ballroom culture, Paris is Burning, the National Film Registry added three films that could all be considered "generation defining" in their respected decades: Blackboard Jungle, John Hughes's The Breakfast Club and Wes Anderson's Rushmore.

What do those three films have in common—what links them? They all focus on teenagers and their problems. And while it's difficult to compare Blackboard Jungle's Eisenhower-era look at teens from the wrong side of the tracks and their dangerous new rock and roll music, Hughes focusing on a group of kids in their suburban Chicagoland Saturday detection, and Anderson's prep school misfit, they're all connected by their high school-aged protagonists.

There are two kinds of teen movies. There is the kind aimed specifically at teens, filled with stars, references, songs, and product placements that teens of a certain generation will almost exclusively relate to. Those can be great—Clueless, anybody?—but films that can appeal to both teenagers and adults tend to be the ones that resonate through the years. That's a big reason why writer, director, and producer Kelly Fremon Craig's The Edge of Seventeen deserves instant-classic status.

Creating the teen movie that adults will like—or, simply, the movie about teens that can appeal to all ages—is a difficult thing to pull off. John Hughes got that. Wes Anderson wasn't aiming to make a teen movie, but sit a high school junior down to watch Jason Schwartzman as Max Fischer in Rushmore and I'm sure they'd get it. It's hard to look at movies like Rebel Without a Cause or The 400 Blows and consider them teen films, but at their heart they work because they're not only great films, but so many of us could relate to those characters and their trials at some point in our lives (although, sadly, we probably didn't look like James Dean or speak French).

Jason Reitman got that formula right when he directed Diablo Cody's screenplay and gave us Juno; 2013's We Are the Best!, an adaptation of a graphic novel about a group of Swedish misfits who start an all-girl punk band in 1982, was simply magical; and 2015 gave us two additions: The Diary of a Teenage Girl, also based on a brilliant graphic novel of the same name, and Dope, which perfectly captured how cool even the most dangerous and fucked-up situations can seem when you're a high school senior (and did it with a mix of 1990s hip hop appreciation and a Ferris Bueller twist for good measure).

The Edge of Seventeen stands on its own as a classic for a number of reasons. Like Dope before it, it's the evolution of the type of teen film that really aims to get teens, both movies descendants of Reagan-era greats like those directed by Hughes, Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Cameron Crowe's Say Anything. But like Dope, The Edge of Seventeen builds on what filmmakers like Hughes and Heckerling started over 30 years ago. It isn't a total pastiche (albeit a great and hilarious one) like 2004's Mean Girls. There might be little clever winks, nods, or undeniable influence, but The Edge of Seventeen is its own, very 2016 film, and it puts Craig in a rare and unique spot of overseeing the making of the movie in nearly every capacity, including sharing co-producer credits with James L. Brooks. If getting the guy who thought The Simpsons, Say Anything and Bottle Rocket were all good enough projects to stamp his name onto isn't a signifier that Craig is probably going to continue making great films, I'm not sure what, besides saying she's the heir to the John Hughes throne, will suffice.

The triple-threat of writing, directing, and producing a great film so early in your career is hard. It's something Hughes did with his "teen trilogy" of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, before handing over the directorial job to Howard Deutch for Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful. Whether Craig (who has called Hughes an influence) will continue exploring similar territory in the future remains to be seen.

It's difficult for adults to get teenagers right on film—very difficult. That's probably why, when it's done well, the better efforts stick around and grow in stature. Adults tend to do a better job capturing teens and all their brilliant weirdness on the page rather than the screen. Judy Blume all the way down the line to J.K. Rowling, Jacqueline Woodson, John Green, Rainbow Rowell, and this year's hilarious debut novelist Goldy Moldavsky aim to attract younger readers, but they end up capturing plenty of adult fans along the way. Hughes considered himself a writer before anything else, Crowe wrote Fast Times, Say Anything, and the semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, while Rick Famuyiwa created the story and was behind the camera for Dope. Craig, by serving as writer and director of The Edge of Seventeen, retained a certain closeness to her material that, I believe, really helped give it an edge some other teen films might not have. The proof is there: Directing the characters you created helps make a teen movie great.

Of course, nothing matters if you don't have the right cast to pull it off. You can't go wrong with Kyra Sedgwick and Woody Harrelson in the roles of the film's adults, but Hailee Steinfeld simply shines as Nadine Franklin, and ends up giving us one of the great teenage protagonists in film history. She is a ball of the big three things that go into making every teen: awkward, angry, and angsty. Nervous energy just pours out of her. She's weird and real, and Craig doesn't make her character apologize for any of that. Nadine screws up. She alienates people, tends to hate herself and the world around her in equal measures, and easily captures what it's like to feel like everything is the end of the world. Steinfeld is the perfect combination of Ally Sheedy as Allison Reynolds in The Breakfast Club and all of John Cusack's neurosis wrapped up into one ball of high-strung millennial weirdness.

More than anything, The Edge of Seventeen, like other great films about and starring teenagers before it, shows that it's a truly difficult thing to make a really great movie about people in high school and whatever hang-ups they might have. Come off too like you're trying hard with all the coolest clothes and over-researched lingo thrown in, and it feels like you're watching that single "How do you do, fellow kids" Steve Buscemi moment from 30 Rock. Dishonesty has ruined many films about 16-year-olds. But get it all just right, using that soft touch for a subject that feels like a boiling kettle that's about to explode at any second, and you get something unforgettable.

DMU Timestamp: March 29, 2019 18:11





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