Kristen Wiig as Charlotte Goetze and Bel Powley as Minnie Goetze.
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Instead of the written diary kept in Gloeckner’s novel, Minnie confides in a cassette recorder for her daily monologue, starting with how she “made it” with her mother’s “main” boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard).
Heller acknowledges that she was pleasantly surprised by the MPAA’s response. First, we have a review of the film by our critic David Edelstein.
The duo recently visited San Francisco to promote The Diary of a Teenage Girl and this is a transcription of that conversation. I think for me the thing that really stands out about the story is that Minnie is very specific, her thoughts and ideas about life and family and sex feel very universal.
“Most movies would have spent the first 30 minutes getting to know the character before she had sex”, Heller says.
Gloeckner: We all start writing and drawing at the same time, probably around kindergarten. It’s an unusually accomplished first film from Marielle Heller, who also wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graphic novel. Parents of teenagers who see the sex tsunami coming watch it with conflicting emotions of fight or flight, but are mostly just left on the proverbial shore hoping their kid won’t drown. Wiig shows she can really cut it in a dramatic role but it’s her lip sync duet with Hader that will stay with you. “Holy s-.” Minnie smiles to herself, but her glow momentarily fades when a buxom blonde jogs past her.
First-time writer-director Marielle Heller takes her aesthetic lead from the era (bell-bottomed 1976 San Francisco) and the visually arresting source material.
Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard) is the type of shiftless, couch-surfing, just-bad-enough boy that proves catnip to a certain type of girl, the kind that delicately walks the tightrope of charm, one gust of wind away from tumbling into grossness.
We shot the movie in San Francisco. Besides, Minnie is too busy growing up to get bogged down in such things, too busy haplessly becoming one of the most memorable protagonists of the year. Minnie muses while surveying the other patrons at a comic-book store, while cartoon penises erupt from her imagination and spring out of their trousers. I wanted to feel like she was me – so she needed to be little normal.
“He’s a good guy”, Minnie assures her diary. “I knew it”, she says of the imagined independence, before crashing down to earth and finding the enchantment has run its course. Kominsky’s reply is an emblem for this clear-eyed depiction of people living in a moral blur: “No. Alienation is good for the art”.
Let me end with praise for Bel Powley’s performance.
POWLEY: (As Minnie) I should paint a picture. You have that kind of power, you know. Just – you just have to do it. It was pretty obvious the majority of the audience was not ready to do the Time Warp again; they wanted to see the movie… I mean it’s a huge risk to give the rights to your book over to someone; a lot of authors have suffered because of it. But I’m not suffering. I didn’t want to be excluded from the fun. “When I was a teenager, it felt like the world was going to implode if something went wrong”.
SCHULMAN: (As Aline) I don’t know either. For you was that your aim in for Minnie’s character? Everybody wants to be touched. I told the therapist [about the sexual experience] and she was totally freaked out, she was actually a therapist who dealt with childhood trauma…so I thought she was going to help me, but she just said, “I’ve met with your mother, I can not talk to you anymore”. It is precisely this point of view that makes Monroe the object, not Minnie, and renders the movie a profoundly compassionate portrait of young female sexuality, rather than a cringey “Lolita” update.
Minnie, big-eyed with dark bangs, is told she “exudes sexuality”. Minnie sees the heads of cute boys turning her way in class. She sees the head of a cute girl turning her way at a druggie party.
What Diary of a Teenage Girl does best is to carve out a place of honesty between those two lazy, half-true takes. In its quiet, unsensational way, the movie is a radical revision.
In the book, we see Monroe’s grooming, coercion and molestation of Minnie.
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GROSS: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine.
