If you’ve ever wondered what
Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day might
have looked like if it weren’t a comedy sans the sardonic and cantankerous Bill
Murray and instead catered to the post-Twilight
arena of blue-tinted high-school female adolescence, then Nobody Walks director Ry Russo-Young’s Before I Fall is for you. If you’re as jaded as the audience I saw Before I Fall with, you’ll hear a myriad
of snickers and soft whispers of contempt emanating throughout the
auditorium. When it ended, there was
laughter and even more groans about sitting through a tween version of Ramis’
aforementioned classic.
Based on the novel by Lauren
Oliver, Before I Fall tells the tale
of a group of mean girls with one of them stuck reliving the same cupid day
over and over, trapped either in Hell, purgatory, or just a bad movie. Despite earnest performances with helpful
life lessons about learning to be accepting of others and not simply trying to
fit into the disingenuous in-crowd, Before
I Fall comes dangerously close to rivalling the prepubescent schmaltz of
the recently released dud The Space
Between Us. While not anywhere near
as dry and dull as that box office bomb turned out to be, Before I Fall doesn’t do a whole lot to separate itself from that
ilk of storytelling.
That’s not to say the film
isn’t well acted, directed or shot. The
highlights of Before I Fall really
are the Vancouver and British Columbian locations, which the film goes out of
it’s way to establish over and over again. With images of houses isolated deep
in the mountains with white peaks looming over the schoolyard grounds, we’re
given a terrific setting that gets squandered on an average movie we’ve seen
one too many times over the years. Also
trying is the electro score by Adam Taylor, which sounds like a frank imitation
of Cliff Martinez if he listened to Glass
Candy for hours on end. Though I’m
an avid fan of electronic music, especially in film, both this and last year’s Nerve went so far out of their way
musically to sound like a Refn film that it was more distracting than
engrossing.
Somewhere in Before I Fall is a good natured but overly melodramatic crossbreed between Mean Girls and The Edge of Seventeen, though my friendly recommendation is to go for the latter film as it encapsulates the female adolescent high school experience with greater clarity and far more emotional resonance than anything in this maudlin exercise in tedium. Also far better at capturing the teenage experience is Richard Linklater’s vastly underrated Everybody Wants Some, featuring leading lady Zoey Deutch who fares well here but is otherwise stuck in a film that fails to give us something we haven’t seen before. Teen viewers who aren’t necessarily seasoned moviegoers may get something out of Before I Fall while the rest of us kept checking our watches in between a heavy dose of eye rolling.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki