After viewing a film, I almost always check Rottentomatoes.com to see what the critics think, so I did not change this habit in the case of Penny Marshall's "Riding in Cars with Boys" (2001). Though I am not myself a film critic, I agree with those who think that Marshall's thumbprint is all over this movie, which is now eleven years old. I can see her input because I watched LaVerne and Shirley back when I was in elementary school. The two characters in this film remind me of the two characters in that sitcom. And this similarity is suggestive of the consensus of the critics; "Riding in Cars with Boys" tries to be serious, and yet it is cute. Some might think this a good, because realistic, combination. (Life is funny even when serious, even in the midst of a crisis.) Others may differ.
If I am not a film critic, however, I certainly am critical. I had my students watch this film actually because I couldn't get my hands on "It's Complicated." I was looking for a film about white women's lives in order to study patterns of treatment. I saw some recognizable patterns in "Riding in Cars..." Too often, films of this theme, tie up stories, end them, with a nice big bow, like the one atop the main character Bev's head on her wedding day. Seated alone in an overdecorated peacock chair, the fifteen-year-old Bev appears to be alone. Her new husband is on the other side of the room. Her family members are seated together away from her. When her father rises to offer what should have been a toast, he instead thanks the guests for supporting the family in what is for them an embarrassing moment in their lives. Bev's only real companion it seems is her best friend Faye. This much is clear. Marshall obviously likes dealing with women's bonds of friendship, and this one endures. I did almost cry when the two finally parted, Faye leaving for Arizona, Bev left in Connecticut--in her view, alone, though she had her son Jason.
The question is whether Bev is in fact truly alone. On the surface, it appears that at every critical moment, she is in fact not alone at all. Although she is left in the peacock chair early in the movie, she clearly has a whole host of supporters, both blood family and other kindred. She is not alone on a desolate island or in a run-down ghetto apartment for that matter taking care of her baby without any help. To the contrary, by the time baby Jason arrives, she has been nicely installed into some of the nicest public housing I have ever seen, a single family home on a cul-de-sac that is Rockwellian minus glowing white paint. Immediately, her home is equipped with everything she needs to make a go at motherhood at the tender age of fifteen--a husband, a stove that goes all the way up to 550, and a mother who, like Bev, would seem not to have to work outside of the home since she has time to come over to her daughter's house during the week and iron and mop for her. Clearly, the family has no intention--good for them--of letting their prodigal daughter fall too low. And Bev, throughout the film, has her mind set on rising up out of her working class life. (We never really see her in poverty--her shoes talk, yes, but she is not without a home; she does not live in a shelter despite the fact that her husband--a junkie--barely works. Marshall doesn't allow the audience to see Bev or her husband Ray applying for Food Stamps. We don't actually see Ray shooting up.)
The long and the short of it is that there is always a lifeline for Bev, and there is a community of watchers--neighbors who never speak but who are there, maybe as silent witnesses to this story of a young white girl's journey toward her American Dream. She is offered a way up and out--even by Lizard, who will pay her two hundred dollars an hour to dry weed for him in her oven. It's a crazy offer but no crazier actually than that made by the nerdy boy-turned-hunk, who invites her to bring her whole family to California. He is another observer of Bev, one who just happened to be in town and chose to stop by a twenty-year-old married woman's house for her six-year-old child's birthday party. He saunters into her living room looking very '70s sexy indeed and, then, like the stalker-observer he is, after the sun has gone down, startles Bev, as he walks from behind her house. He offers her a completely unrealistic deal--the housing of her whole family including a not-yet-discovered drug abusing Ray. Why? Is he that in love? Maybe. "You don't belong here," he tells her and advises her to do the right thing--take him up on his offer and get the heck out of the world of public housing. These are the makings of a Cinderella story (or any other damsel in distress narrative) only Bev will soon find out that she cannot go to California. She has to help Ray break his heroin habit, about which she has been for two years clueless. Is heroin usually taken intravenously? How could she not have known? The answer is that Bev is not real; she is a Hollywood made character, and more than that she is a meta-character. Or, as one critic wrote, "the rough edges of Donofrio's life are either ignored or smoothed away." Her pains are kept at a distance, from her and from viewers. There are no closeups, no sweaty faces, no hearts beating out of these characters' hearts as they try to figure out how to make rent. If this is a drama, it could have been more dramatic and without moving too far--toward melodrama. It is a comedic drama and, as such, does serious injustice to its topic of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and poverty.
So, finally, the question becomes why America might want a film that is, on the surface, about difficulty but that won't deeply engage the difficulties. First, I think this movie is representative of the kind of bubble we lived in during the early 2000s and, second, America has reason not to want to see certain figures hit rock bottom. "Riding in Cars with Boys," a film whose very title refuses responsibility, i.e., Bev gets pregnant not because she decided to have sex (she boldly denies it to her father) but because she rode in a car with two bad boys, who, as bad as they were nevertheless did the right thing and married the girls they got pregnant. The title doesn't so much suggest complete falsehood as it does our postmodernness, an inability to come to terms with present reality because reality is always being buffered and constructed by those who mediate it. We are now living in a Recession-Depression, and we were sliding into it even as we lived in the bubble that finally burst. And yet, there are people who are now and have for a long time been alone in the world for real--many of them white women. But too many American films just hint at these realities, never getting beneath the surface or allowing us to see our desperate selves really up-close and personal. In this way, films create the buffer, which is why Marshall's film fails to rise above entertainment to a level of social critique. Even high art can offer social critique, so film doesn't have to sacrifice seriousness out of fear of compromising art.
By the way, there is, in this film about the difficulty of rising from the working class, one minority, whose name is omitted from Rotten Tomatoes' list of characters. Marshall had no problem showing this Latina in all of her desperation. Where Drew Barrymore's character always appears nicely put-together, Ray's second wife was disheveled, hair tossed, with a cigarette hanging from her mouth and her weary hands shaking. On the other hand, after all that Bev supposedly goes through, Marshall's treatment does not try to depart from the theme of creating happy endings for white women. Rather, the film ends with wayward Bev, honestly not looking a day older than she did at the start of the movie despite lots of vibrant red lipstick and a more mature haircut, reuniting with her father. And the same song that began the film ends it. "Dream, dream, dream..." She and Dad have healed their relationship and, through it, healed any doubts the audience may have had about the health of the American Dream. It seems too easy to suggest that the health of that dream depends on Hollywood continuing to nurture a psychic wellness itself dependent upon perpetuation of the message and the myth of white women's wellness, but there it is.
I asked students to look in this movie at themes of race, class, and gender. So far in our discussions they have not talked about race. Some have said they don't see race being treated. I have not yet responded to that observation. I'm waiting for them to discover that sometimes race is treated by not being treated directly. Some of the most dangerous treatments of race are those that create false worlds in which people of color are rendered invisible.
