Sophie Jones

Sophie Jones is a simple and delicate film, with so much going on under the surface. The characters felt complex, authentic, and appropriately high school aged -- not only physically, but also with just the right amount of angst. It's one of those films that you can tell was birthed through real trauma and pain, but from someone who has done a lot of healing on the other side of that trauma. So, as an audience member, you feel taken care of. You trust the filmmaker to lead you into truth, and into a better place.

This has all the trademarks of Hallmark -- lily white, clean and scrubbed, upper middle class, suburban softcore malaise.

In other words, it oozes what we now call white privilege and entitlement. Even in its faux teen messiness, it feels trivial in its woe-is-me preciousness.

What's missing, thankfully, is that whenever the teen daughters seem vulnerable, that the single parent does NOT feel obligated to try to give them a comforting Mr. Cleaver style lecture that mysteriously makes everything feel alright.

Nonetheless, in that way, this is still more like Wonder Years for modern teens in the Pacific North West. If this movie's purpose was to remind us of the vapidness of whiny self-absorbed suburban teen white girls and flat-affected suburban teen white boys, then mission accompished. This story reeks with so-what-ism.

Grief can be very confusing and you just don't know how you will react until it happens. Losing someone as important as a mother during adolescent years would only make it more so. I think this is exactly how a teenage girl might react with the pressures of sex always there in those years added to the intensity of how the grief process can be. I especially like how Sophie's friends are such good support for her, staying with her while she works this out internally. This is probably not a film for a lot of people who may not understand what's going on. I will be interested to see further work this filmmaker does in future.

There's a lot to admire here. The cast is uniformly excellent, especially the unknown young actors who genuinely look like high school students. And it's a handsome production despite what I'm guessing was a micro indie budget. The biggest problem I had with the film was Sophie herself (and Jessica Barr who plays her and is every bit as annoying as her screen personage). The character is a real pill, and I grew annoyed with her within the first 15 minutes. Accordingly, the 85-minute run time felt a lot longer. Maybe high school girls who see the film (will they even know it exists?) will have a different reaction. Overall it reminded me of an Eliza Hittman ("Never Rarely Sometimes Always") movie--esp Hittman's debut, "It Felt Like Love"--but not as good.

First, over the past decade, there have been changes in the attributes of teenagers. Studies show that a teen in the US today is less likely to have tried alcohol, had a driver's license, or had sex compared with similarly aged teens 20 years ago. Even teen pregnancy has also plummeted in the West. Social scientists hypothesize that teens act according to how hostile their local environment feels to them. Scientists call it the "life history theory (see studies by Jean Twenge)."

After watching "Sophie Jones," my first reaction was, "Who was this film made for?" Because it certainly DOES NOT depict any alternative and AUTHENTIC female perspective that I know. What member of the female demographic is this movie really aiming toward? It certainly does not champion women of color. I go further to say that it doesn't speak to anyone except to those with the leisure and time to even think this warrants a full-length movie.

Not everything needs to be about everyone. But real artists with something actual to say know how to enrich all of us even speaking about a singular subject. They speak truth to humanity and the human condition and do it with authenticity and can bring some universal human conditions to life. This is definitely not the case with this movie, Sophie Jones.

The premise: A grieving, middle class, privileged, suburban, Caucasian teenager, lashes out from the loss of her mother by being promiscuous with her fellow classmates.

If it is true that teens react and behave in accordance to how hostile their environment is, then this filmmaker plays her hand as she has chosen to chronicle the faux hardships of Caucasian-American, bourgeoisie female adolescence. "Sophie Jones" is just another in a long list of Sundance sponsored, indie fare, trying to capitalize and monetize the #metoo movement.

Is it entertaining? Not at all. But for the first 40 minutes I hung in there with hope in how the story might play out. After 40 minutes, my partner and I began skipping scenes. Is it badly acted? Not really, although mostly forgettable, Skyler Verity is pretty good. AS far as production value go, it's handled with aplomb and deft cliche. Meaning, many of the indie movie trappings that we've seen so much over the few last years are front and center: jump-cuts, documentary style mis-en-scene, mumbling dialogue, splashed with the garden variety (false) angst and ingenue. Of course there's also the veritable indie music soundtrack.

But what about the strange amount of positive reviews on the internet? I suspect that some of it comes from the usual suspects, mixed with those involved in the production and others with good will. On other internet sites, it's the result of blatant pandering. Actual artists and writers are saying that if they pandered to the cultural tone that is currently being set, particularly by older Caucasian female critics, they would have had 10 stories published by now.

Social science data or not, Sophie Jones was not made for most teens in the world, and definitely not for adolescent girls of color probably anywhere. Because teens in most of the world have real challenges to confront and also serves as an indictment against this films' narrative. With the finite supply of human attention, bad film-making will always find a way to capitalize on buzz topics. And might even get rewarded for it. That's capitalism for you. It's the American way.

However, one thing that could be said of Sophie Jones is the vivid depiction of how privilege and narcissism works played out for an hour and 25 minutes. If this movie's character and filmmaker was as authentic and sincere as it all pretended to be, then the appropriate thing to do is to change the title character and the movie's name, because we're witnessing the makings of an all new Karen.