Fridae

Whip It is very much your typical teenage coming of age movie, this time featuring a girl who wants to trade her prom dress for a pair of roller skates. According to the formula, one teenager’s encounter with sports (if you grant roller derby this distinction) serves as a vehicle for her to grow up and mature into adulthood. Substitute in roller derby for martial arts (The Karate Kid) and football (Bend It Like Beckham) and you have pretty much got the idea. Ultimately though, despite its clichéd premise, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed this movie, and cared for the characters.

Bliss Cavendish (Page) lives in a small town in middle of nowhere Texas working part time in a diner called the Oink Joint. Worse, she is burdened with an overbearing but well meaning mother (Harden) whose ambition is to secure her future by entering her in beauty pageants and turning her into an awful caricature of a Southern belle. Her outlet for rebellion comes in a chance encounter with roller derby, and improbably selection into a team of perennial losers called the Hurl Scouts.

By now most viewers will be able to flesh out the rest of the plot quite easily. There is of course a love interest, who is, quite naturally, the lead singer in a rock band. There is conflict – a falling out with her nerdy best friend and her parents (when they find out what she is actually doing instead of attending SAT classes), but ultimately reconciliation. The Hurl Scouts of course improve dramatically, with Bliss’ help, leading to a dramatic deciding match at the end. But where familiarity often breeds contempt, Whip It is an immensely likeable vehicle, with characters you find yourself rooting for.

A large part of the credit for how good this movie is must go to the actors, chief among them Ellen Page. I pay her the utmost compliment when I say she is utterly believable and compelling playing a teenager (even more so than in Juno) giving us the selfishness, insecurity, vulnerability and determination that encapsulates Bliss. The supporting cast is also uniformly excellent from the hilariously over-the-top (Barrymore as a derby teammate, Juliette Lewis as the nemesis), the zany (Andrew Wilson as the coach), to the subtle (Harden).

I came into this movie expecting a collision of clichés. Instead I found myself unresistingly being whipped along for the ride by this winsome film. I suggest you do the same.