An
edited film review by Roxana Hadadi for rogerebert.com on Mar. 8, 2021.
Is there ever a point at which grief gets easier? 16-year-old Sophie Jones (Jessica Barr) is going through it. Her
mother has recently died. She feels tangible distance from her sister Lucy (Charlie Jackson) and their father Aaron
(Dave Roberts). Every day feels like
a struggle that just bleeds into another, and another, and another. Nothing
feels right - and that unease, when coupled with Sophie’s adolescent sexual
awakening, makes for a complicated mix that Sophie
Jones tracks with rawness, poignancy, and slightly too much vagueness.
The
film is a family affair, directed by Jessie
Barr and written by Jessie and her cousin Jessica, who also stars in Sophie Jones as its titular teenager.
The Barrs drew from their own personal experiences as adolescents who each lost
a parent to cancer, and the result is that Sophie
Jones feels deeply authentic in its understanding of grief. There are no
grand blowouts here, no massively emoting moments. Instead, Sophie Jones rejects linear storytelling
to operate more as a series of vignettes, spread out over two or so years,
which follow Sophie as she struggles to mourn her mother, develop her own
personality, and explore her sexual identity. We jump forward sometimes days,
sometimes weeks, sometimes months, but the focus is always two-pronged: the
inner sadness Sophie carries that she rarely shares with anyone else, and the
outer sexual confidence - tiptoeing into aggression - that she displays as she
jumps from boy to boy.
On
the one hand, this centers Jessica Barr’s organic, naturalistic performance,
allowing the actress space to work out the myriad oppositional complexities
related to mourning and desire. When we meet Sophie, she’s opening the bag of
her mother’s ashes, sifting through them with her fingers, and putting some in
her mouth (something she’ll do as a defensive mechanism throughout the film).
Is it macabre that in the next scene, she’s swiping on some lip gloss and
sucking on a lollipop while proposing a hookup with classmate Kevin (Skyler Verity)? Maybe, but this sort of
vacillation is Sophie’s new normal. She hasn’t been doing drugs, drinking, or
engaging in self-harm, she tells a therapist - but what she doesn’t share is
that her sexual experimentation is gaining her a certain reputation.
No
interaction is exactly the same. There’s Kevin, who clearly has feelings for
Sophie that go further than just their hookups; she shuts him down. There’s Tony
(Chase Offerle) a senior who tells a
friend of an acquaintance Kate (Sam
Kamerman) that he thinks Sophie is cute; suddenly she’s planning to lose
her virginity to him. There’s Riley (Tristan
Decker) Sophie’s closest male friend, who has been by her side since third
grade and who has never made a move - but whom Sophie tries to forcibly kiss in
her car. Sophie’s grief and her sexual choices are probably interlinked, as
Sophie’s worried best friend Claire (Claire
Manning) suggests, but Sophie doesn’t care about being looked down upon by
her classmates. So what if other girls laugh at her? So what if a random
acquaintance pulls her aside to tell her she’s embarrassing herself? Could any
of that really be worse than losing her mother? Sophie Jones doesn’t shy away from the reactions Sophie receives,
but it refuses to judge her, either.
That’s
an admirable, arguably essential, quality for coming-of-age stories; think of
how other recent films in this subgenre, like Lady Bird, Skate Kitchen,
and Hala, also treat their female
characters with the respect that previous generations of films about young
women often lacked. Sophie Jones
equates being inside its character’s headspace with being close to her
physically: tight shots of her profile as she drives around, a floating camera
in her bedroom as she somberly thinks about her mother, and well-edited hookup
scenes that capture her gleeful abandon or painful regret. But on the other
hand, Sophie Jones sometimes stumbles
in this narrowness. The film’s alignment with Sophie is so thorough that there
are no scenes without her, which makes some of these time jumps disorienting.
If we’ve been with Sophie this whole time, how did weeks just pass? When did
the relationship she suddenly has with one of these guys occur? What happened
in the time between, say, New Year’s, and when Sophie is suddenly getting ready
to leave for college? The narrative connections are sometimes so hazy that
Sophie’s behavior reads more as erratic than it does spontaneous, and additional
plot details in the Barrs’ script might have better contextualized some of her
personality shifts.
Nevertheless,
this approach favors Jessica Barr’s inhabiting of the character she helped
write, and that is undoubtedly the greatest strength of Sophie Jones. Watching it, I was reminded of Margaret Atwood’s
quote from the novel Alias Grace: When
you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion.
Nearly every scene in Sophie Jones is
either meditative or combative in some way, and Barr nails the flickering,
shifting, visceral emotions of adolescence. The deadpan way she says of oral
sex, I could just bite his dick off if I
wanted to, and then her little laugh afterward; her utterly unimpressed
delivery of, This is sex? This is it?;
the way her face shifts from tense rapture to barely veiled perturbation when Kevin
asks her, You’re on birth control, right?;
how she lets her sentences trail off when she’s tired of a conversation. Even
when the script relies too much on her affect, the actress remains impressively
self-possessed, and the film’s framing of her is evocative. Sophie Jones is a promising effort from
both Barr women. [Hadadi's rating: 3 stars out of 4]
Labels:
drama, high-school, teenager
IMDb 54/100
MetaScore (critics=72, viewers=tbd)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=72, viewers=80)
Blu-ray
Roxana Hadadi review
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