“Babyteeth” is a self-consciously “quirky” cancer romance that tries, ever so hard, to distance itself from any of the typical YA tropes. ”The Fault in our Stars” this is not, even though, in some key moments near its end, it does feel as though Australian director Shannon Murphy’s feature-length debut will spiral out of control. The fact that it doesn’t is a testament to this rookie director’s raw talents behind the camera.
“Babyteeth” delivers an auspicious debut for Murphy who shows a real gift for mood and visuals with an otherwise familiar story, on-paper at least. This high-wire act of movie, one filled with style and unusually eccentric behavior.
The darkly comic film deals with Willa (Eliza Scanlen Beth of the recent “Little Women”) a 16-year-old girl with terminal cancer, who meets, at a Sydney subway station, 23-year-old junkie Moses (Toby Wallace). He’s homeless, abandoned by his family, and covered in tattoos, the overall look he has screams STAY AWAY, and yet, Willa is smitten and wants to bring him home to meet mom and dad.
As expected, this bout of “meet the parents” doesn’t go so well for Willa. Moses is suspect at best, Willa’s Father Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and mother Anna (Essie Davis) believe he doesn’t care for their daughter and just wants to use Willa to get a quick fix from Henry’s pharmaceutical cabinet, for which he steals a bunch of packets on the way out. Willa even turns a blind eye when she catches her new crush lying straight to her face, she doesn’t even care, she just wants to be with him.
The red flags raised by Willa’s parents about Moses don’t deter from the fact that this may very well be dying Willa’s last chance at love and some kind of happiness. And so, Henry and Anna allow Moses to move into their home, knowing that if they don’t then their daughter will run away. “Worst parenting decision ever,” sighs Anna, as she and Henry watch their daughter and Moses violently playing around half-naked on the lawn. We think so too.
It’s not like the parents are any better at dealing with the lemons given to them. Henry is a psychiatrist who dips into his own morphine stash and insistently prescribes Xanax to Anna, a former concert pianist prodigy who can’t seem to cope in mothering a dying daughter without getting high at the dinner table. But, hey, at least these torn-up marital lovebirds try to keep their sex life alive - the Finlays have appointment sex every Tuesday in Henry’s office, specifically, on his work desk. This desperate act in marriage maintenance ends up backfiring on them as Henry connects with the quirky pregnant neighbor next door (Emily Barclay) and Anna rekindles a past “friendship” with a former colleague, who now happens to be Willa’s piano teacher.
There’s so much skillful creativity to “Babyteeth” that, despite its flaws, it’s very hard to shrug it off. Murphy is such an in-tune director that she knows any sort of over-romanticizing of Willa and Moses is the wrong way to go. So many movies in the past have tried to use maudlin overreaching to tug at the heartstrings of viewers. Murphy has no sympathy for that, she doesn’t try to make her lead characters adherently likable, there’s no room for that in this film, rather, it’s their humanity that seeps through.
The film’s visuals are overstuffed with style - every scene is introduced with a flashy title, which gets tiresome the more it goes along, but retains the film’s acerbic feel. There are sequences in “Babyteeth” that can also leave you in awe, including one at a neon-lit party where Milla, with the light and shadow of Andrew Commis’ glorious cinematography, loses herself in dance and music. The musical choices by Murphy are excellent and in-tune with the movie’s eccentricities and visuals; Tune-Yards, Sudan Archives, and other indie acts are indelibly featured here.
Mendelsohn and, especially, Davis turn in solid performances as disillusioned parents who don’t know how to cope with the dire situation that has been thrust upon them. If anything, Anna is just as seminal to the movie as Willa, showing all the vulnerabilities that can come with having to deal with such a tragic hand in life. Wallace, playing a character that could have easily repelled us, finds the humor and humanism that Willa might see in Moses. Meanwhile, Beth is a star-in-the-making, after stealing the show in “Little Women” she’s bound to break big in the years to come, her performance here is genuine, warm, but never too-cuddly. Willa has flaws, she can sometimes be unlikable, but her struggles end up mattering to us.
The script, by Rita Kalnejais, based on her own stage play, is a tightrope mix of romance and punk-rock attitude. It tries to take the familiar and infuse it with a fresh set of eyes. In “Babyteeth” there is dark comedy, but also a total lack of sentiment, unlike other YA-inspired fare, there won’t be any hospital scenes or tear-jerker induced moments.
Indeed, for the most part, mawkish sentiment is kept at bay here, until a coda which feels a little too calculated and doesn’t deliver the cathartic feeling Murphy otherwise intended. The film also tends to deviate into the conventional, relying on its bright stylings to hide the tonal inconsistencies which seep into the fidgety narrative . Regardless, Murphy doesn’t play it safe with her storytelling, she turns what could have been a mundane affair into a lively and genuinely exciting debut feature, flaws and all. [B-]
“Babyteeth” is now available on-demand