#BeverlyDonofrio

[adamwatchesmovies]

Riding in Cars with Boys (2001)

I can feel Riding in Cars with Boys wrapping its fingers around my neck, desperately trying to wring out the emotions. I say no. NO! This movie may be poised to be emotional but it lacks the genuine heart to make it effective.

Based on the memoirs of Beverly Donofrio, the film begins in 1961. Beverly “Bev” Donofrio (Drew Barrymore) is a smart teenager who dreams of going to college in New York. Unfortunately, she becomes pregnant at 15. Soon she’s married to the baby’s father, Ray (Steve Zahn), and her whole life gets flushed from one toilet to another directly below it. Through it all though, there’s hope that she can climb her way out of this mess of her own making.

The biggest problem with this inspirational drama is Drew Barrymore. She's not right for this role. As a teenage girl, she doesn’t look the part and she simply doesn't have the skills needed to get you to overlook this detail. Next issue: she’s too attractive. No football jock would reject a girl who looks like Bev, even if she handed him some poetry at a party and this makes the circumstances in which she meets Ray unbelievable. She’s just too good-looking. This uneven foundation means the emotions don't come the way they should. Are there tears? Yes, but they ring false. There’s a spark missing throughout. Bev never comes off as a tough mother who loves her child and would never have traded her life for anything else in the world, despite the fact that it came in the way of her dreams. She appears selfish, bitter, petty, and overall unsympathetic. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “unfit” to be a mother, but certainly not motherly.

You want to connect emotionally to this story and its characters. It's easy to understand how difficult it must be for Bev or any mother to raise children while their partner continuously proves themselves useless, or worse. Everyone feels that desire to be more than what life expects you to be, that determination to overcome adversity at any cost. Except the movie doesn't really show you a "way out" or provide any true insight on what this kind of life is like. When you look at the grand scheme of things, she's actually much better off than Ray - who turns out to be a more complex person than her. In a movie like this, you're supposed to leave realizing that yes indeed, Bev's life was made better by giving birth. That's what she says, but you don't believe it, you don't see it, you don't feel it.

When the movie does work is when it spends time with Bev’s son Jason (various actors when he’s young, Adam Garcia when he’s a man). Even from a young age, you can tell there's a lot of conflicting ideas inside the boy. All of the best scenes concern him in one way or another. I know many will be suckered by this true story and the credit all belongs to him.

I’m making Riding in Cars with Boys sound way worse than it is. It’s not unbearable. I can even understand people liking it but you can tell there's someone else out there telling this story better. When it tries to be funny, it really isn’t. It’s a movie about a woman who is not a good mother but we’re supposed to think that she is and the ending is too neat, too clean considering all we've seen before. In different hands, Riding in Cars with Boys could have brought me to tears, but this effort did not come even close. (On DVD, September 12, 2015)

[gustavosanoli]

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