After moviegoers saw her as literature\u2019s most famous sick teen \u2014 Beth in 2019\u2019s Little Women <\/em>\u2014 Eliza Scanlen again plays an ailing adolescent here, but Milla is nothing like the beloved March waif. The 15-year-old meets Moses (Toby Wallace) when he jumps ahead of her on a train platform, and whether it\u2019s his face tattoos, rattail, or the T-shirt he gamely sacrifices when Milla gets a nosebleed, she is quickly smitten by the 23-year-old\u2019s charms. She brings him home to meet her parents, Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and Anna (Essie Davis), who are less impressed. They see a drug dealer and troublemaker, but they also soon see that Moses is the only thing that has brought joy to their daughter as she battles cancer. They reluctantly bring Moses into the fold, sacrificing what they thought was important in surprising ways so Milla can be happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Babyteeth<\/em> never lets us get comfortable with our initial impressions of its characters, with each scene offering a new facet of people we thought we had figured out. Whether it\u2019s the devoted father and psychiatrist Henry or the would-be deadbeat Moses, none of Kalnejais\u2019s characters can be boiled down to a single, one-dimensional descriptor. With finely shaded performances from each of the four actors to match the script, they feel like real people, which makes their pain and pleasure all the more palpable. Their actions feel believable, even when their choices are bad (or not what we think we\u2019d do in their situation), while the handheld cinematography from Andy Commis brings a sense of both immediacy and intimacy to the lives of Milla, her parents, and Moses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With seemingly mundane chapter titles and the occasional direct-to-camera glance from its heroine, Babyteeth <\/em>boasts a sly wit amidst a family\u2019s pain. There\u2019s a playfulness to the proceedings that you don\u2019t expect with a film about a terminally ill teen. It\u2019s just weird enough, while avoiding the cliches of both quirky festival films and modern melodramas, navigating its own new path. Murphy\u2019s direction and Kalnejais\u2019s script both give the audience a lot of credit; abrupt edits transition from scene to scene, intentionally leaving out details and trusting us to keep up with where it is going and who we\u2019re traveling with. And we\u2019re on board for most of its running time \u2014 but at almost two hours, Babyteeth<\/em> droops a bit in the middle, as Milla and Moses laze about her family\u2019s Sydney home. There are moments of sweetness to savor, but it ambles forward slowly in these scenes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, as the film nears its end, Murphy brings us back, dealing repeated blows to both the heart and gut in a pair of final scenes. You might think you\u2019re above the manufactured sadness of Sparks films and their knockoffs, but there\u2019s something so real here that it\u2019s impossible to escape Babyteeth <\/em>unscathed. It all works because of its balance of darkness and light, which Murphy deftly moves between with a grace that belies her status as a first-time filmmaker. Anyone who has seen Davis in 2014\u2019s The Babadook<\/em> or Mendelsohn in, well, anything, already know that they\u2019re actors to watch, but Babyteeth<\/em> establishes Scanlan, Wallace, and especially Murphy as talents to keep your eye on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Babyteeth” is out Friday on demand.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A glance at Babyteeth\u2019s brief synopsis makes it seem like this shattering Australian tragicomedy could be an adaptation of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":594,"featured_media":14273,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[1098,162],"class_list":["post-14270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22805,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14270\/revisions\/22805"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/babyteeth2-1-1024x614.jpg\")
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nB+<\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"