Alright, I’m going to do this properly.
First off, I give it a 1 out of 10. It was often downright boring, Alexis Bledel was criminally underused, and Jenny is less the protagonist she’s set up to be and more just the source of conflict for her parents, who are the real main characters of the movie.
Also, the movie did very little to sell the idea that Jenny and Kitty were in love.
More in depth/spoilery stuff behind the cut.
The movie’s opening scene would have been perfect if it had been followed by a fun comedy centered on Jenny. We first see her standing in a church, holding her godchild during their baptism. Her mom comments that she looks so happy with the baby, wink wink nudge nudge. But when the priest has Jenny and the other god parents go through the normal godparent vows, Jenny doesn’t say I do, and then says she doesn’t believe in Satan, or that all things attributed to him are bad. The priest rolls his eyes and tells her to just say the vows anyway.
That scene promises a fun story about how Jenny’s lesbianism, family, and faith all intersect in interesting and unexpected ways.
But it’s a false promise.
The church is never brought up again, except in a throw-away line by Jenny’s mom that Jenny can’t get married in one now. There is nothing unexpected about how Jenny’s parents react. They’re complete stereotypes of old small town people. AND YET THEY ARE THE FOCUS OF THE MOVIE.
I’m completely serious, they’re the ones who go through character growth. The other characters mostly exist to service their story. And it’s a very boring story, because you know the whole time that they will accept Jenny and Jenny will forgive them. There’s no suspense (and little emotion) when you make the parents the center of a coming out story. You’re not going to make your protagonists irremediable assholes who reject their daughter. I didn’t want this to be a story about Jenny coming out and fearing her parents would never accept her, but seeing that side of it would have been 500 times better than what happened.
As it was, Jenny was barely a character. She’s a social worker who pretended her partner was her roommate for five years because her town is filled with assholes. But she doesn’t have much of a real personality. We’re told she always tells the truth, and I think it’s supposed to be ironic but the writers don’t pull it off. She’s so scared of telling her family, but we don’t see the real fall out from it. She bounces right to being happy and being 100% okay with rejecting them completely. (BECAUSE SHE’S JUST THERE TO HELP HER PARENTS FIND THEIR WAY TO BEING DECENT PEOPLE.)
Alexis Bledel’s character, Kitty, is far worse. She could have been replaced by a body pillow and the movie wouldn’t have changed at all except the scandal would have been actually entertaining. There wasn’t a single thing she said that wasn’t 100% generic. THOUGH ALEXIS BLEDEL IS AMAZING AND MADE ME LIKE HER ANYWAY. I kept waiting for the moment where Kitty took charge and talked to one of Jenny’s parents (that is a trope I still love), but she never did it. She never did anything.
The only time she broke her complete passivity was in a conversation that boils down to this:
Kitty: It’s cool that you finally want to be out to everyone about us, but this is a funeral I think this might not be the time to debut our relationship status. I don’t want to go in with you.
Jenny: Nonsense.
And then Kitty went with her anyway. And it was bad and Jenny’s dad said some dumb shit and Jenny publicly embarrassed everyone, but especially Kitty, by announcing that her dad wants to know which of them wears a strap on.
At a funeral.
Yeah.
There was also a weird thing where the movie tried to frame the problem as Jenny lying rather than Jenny being gay, but AS YOU CAN IMAGINE that’s bullshit and also all but two characters outside of Jenny and Kitty were raging homophobes.
There was almost an interesting story about Jenny’s relationship with her sister and her sister deciding to get a divorce. But for it to work the movie would have had to care about digging into their characters and have some criticism of heteronormativity and the expected family unit.
Long story short, I wouldn’t suggest seeing this movie. I initially thought I would recommend going just because Alexis Bledel has the world’s cutest hair cut, but she’s not onscreen enough for even that to be worth it.
SittingOverHereDreaming 