106 min | PG-13 | April 28, 2023 | Lionsgate
Margaret Simon is eleven, freshly transplanted to the New Jersey suburbs, and negotiating with a God she is not sure she believes in. She wants a normal body, the right friends, and a religion to call her own. Kelly Fremon Craig adapts Judy Blume without flinching and without condescending to a single fear on screen.
Margaret Simon is eleven years old when her father’s promotion moves the family from Manhattan to suburban New Jersey. She is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Christian mother who raised her without religion. She talks to God anyway, in private, in the second person, asking for a normal body and a place to fit. Kelly Fremon Craig’s film is about the year Margaret spends waiting to grow up. It treats puberty, faith, and belonging as the same question asked three different ways.
Abby Ryder Fortson plays Margaret with no performance of cuteness. She lets the camera sit on a face working through embarrassment and want, and she never signals to the audience what to feel. Rachel McAdams plays Barbara, the mother who quits her job to become a suburban volunteer and discovers the role does not fit. McAdams builds the unraveling in small gestures, a forced smile at a school committee and a stack of unfinished craft projects. Kathy Bates plays Sylvia, the New York grandmother who refuses to be left behind, loud and possessive and afraid of losing her only grandchild. Elle Graham makes Nancy Wheeler, the popular girl who runs the secret club, both a tormentor and a frightened kid hiding the same insecurities as everyone else.
Fremon Craig writes and directs the adaptation of Judy Blume’s novel, and she trusts the small scale of the source. The production design renders 1970 New Jersey in wood paneling, floral wallpaper, and pastel kitchens without turning the period into a joke. The camera frames Margaret at her own eye level, so the adults loom slightly and the bathroom mirror becomes a place of private negotiation. The editing follows the shape of a school year in seasonal beats, and it lets ordinary moments run long enough to find the discomfort in them. Benny Safdie plays the father Herbert as a calm counterweight, and the film keeps his religion and his wife’s as background pressure rather than plot.
The film refuses to inflate Margaret’s problems into melodrama or to shrink them into nostalgia. It takes a sixth grader’s anxieties as seriously as the grief and disappointment moving through the adults around her. Fremon Craig finds the connection between a girl praying for her period and a mother praying that she made the right choice. Both are asking the same God for permission to be who they already are. The result is a coming-of-age film that respects the smallness of its stakes and the size of what they mean.