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Movie Review: Whip It

BY MAGGIE SCOTT

Drew Barrymore is a charming young lady and a vivacious actress who’s a veteran in front of the camera after more than 20 years in the motion picture industry. Winning personality and natural acting abilities have assured her of steady work, plenty of fans and positive critics.
After taking a chance and stepping out of her comfort zone, Barrymore can now call herself director with the release of Whip It, a coming-of-age story it’s easy to imagine Barrymore strongly identifying with, because its heroine, Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page), is a rebel…albeit, an unassuming one who doesn’t leave any destruction in the wake of her struggles to pursue her dream.
In the backwater of Bodeen, Texas, it’s not hard for teens like Bliss and her sidekick, Pash (Alia Shawkat), to realize that they may be experiencing the height of their town’s culture at the Oink Joint (“Home of the Squealer”), serving up barbecue food and fixings.

Although they are decent people and have solid middle-class jobs, Bliss’s parents (Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern) aren’t exactly role models for living outside the box. Mom wants daughter to follow in her beauty pageant competition footsteps, even though the experience didn’t lead Mrs. Cavendar any further than a job as a mail-carrier with the U.S. postal service.

Awakening to the realization that she wants more and she wants different, Bliss, nonetheless remains restlessly respectful of her mother’s pageant hopes. She never acts out in any way more shocking than letting Pash give her hair cerulean blue highlights right before stepping up to the pageant mike to complete the sentence, “If I could have dinner with anyone….”

That changes when Mom and daughter travel to Austin to go shopping, and Bliss sets mesmerized eyes on two of the members of a ladies roller derby team. Bliss sneaks out to attend a match, and…she’s hooked. Lying about her age, Bliss tells Maggie Mayhem (SNL’s Kristen Wiig) she wants a chance to try out for the Hurl Scouts.

Winning over their skeptical coach, Razor (Andrew Wilson), and demonstrating some skill and nerve for one of the key moves in roller derby—the “whip”—Bliss is taken under the Scouts’ wings and bestowed with one of the defining elements of a roller derby skater: a snazzy name.

Now known as Babe Ruthless, Bliss can hold her own with the women sporting such monikers as Jabba the Slut, Rosa Sparks, Eve of Destruction and Smashley Simpson. Concealing her new life from the folks gets even more complicated when Bliss falls for Oliver (Landon Pigg), a rock musician. With every confidence-boosting moment, whether it’s knocking the captain (Juliette Lewis) of the Scouts’ rivals—the Holy Rollers—off her skates, or joining Oliver in a swimming pool’s deep end for a sensual underwater ballet, Bliss is closer to being able to admit to her parents that for her there’s going to be more to life than being the winner of the Blue Bonnet Pageant.

Bliss’s winsome charm never evolves beyond stubbornly one-dimensional; the roller derby scenes could have used a heaping helping of blood and guts; and Barrymore should have sat through a couple screenings of a classic of small-town Texas life—The Last Picture Show—for some inspiration on how to inject some “deep in the heart of Texas” grit into this well-mannered directorial debut.

A Mandate Pictures production, Fox Searchlight release, rated PG-13 for sexual content, language and drug material.

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