The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

Directed by: Kelly Fremon Craig | 104 minutes | comedy, drama | Actors: Hailee Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner, Kyra Sedgwick, Woody Harrelson, Hayden Szeto, Alexander Calvert, Eric Keenleyside, Nesta Cooper, Daniel Bacon, Lina Renna, Ava Grace Cooper, Christian Michael Cooper, Jena Skodje

High school comedy was a popular genre in the 1980s and early 1990s. These were the years of the ideal of malleability, in which it ultimately did not matter to which social group someone belonged. Ethnicity was just as unimportant. After all, at the end of the day, anyone could become whoever or whatever they wanted to be, without any hierarchical distinction. Growth and change came from the environment. School was the setting where characters learned exactly who they were.

For example, the teenagers in ‘The Breakfast Club’ (John Hughes; 1985) find that, despite their apparent differences, they have the same age problems as everyone else. In ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ (Hughes, 1986), the film’s truant namesake realizes that those problems are there to be forgotten. ‘Clueless’ (Amy Heckerling; 1995) takes the idea of ​​malleability even further with the story of a wealthy beauty queen who wants to transform a less fortunate schoolmate from a wallflower into an image. Until she too realizes that her own life has the necessary shortcomings that need to be remedied.

In the years that followed, the influx of high school comedies died down. The manufacturability principle disappeared into the background. Characters returned to the people they always were. Growth came from within themselves. School became exemplary of the agony they went through in life. Realism instead of fairytale teenage romance. Although the film maintains some genre conventions, ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ continues in that more modern line. The question arises, however, whether the film has helped with that.

Already in the first scene, main character Nadine (persuasive role by Hailee Steinfeld) storms into her favorite teacher’s classroom with the announcement that she wants to end her life. Is her life that bad? Her father, and at the same time a bosom friend, passed away a few years ago. With her mother she is water and fire. Her best, and only, friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) has fallen for her worst enemy: brother Darian (Blake Jenner). Worse, the love is completely mutual. The boy she herself is secretly in love with does not see her. In an emotional mood, she accidentally sends the popular boy a message declaring her physical love. The final prelude to an apparently inevitable suicide.

It won’t get that far. Her problems and emotions are real, but also belong to a typical well-to-do white teenager in an affluent white school. Her suicide bluff is nothing more than a cry for attention. So her life is not that bad. For herself, that feels completely different, as any teenager can place themselves at the center of the universe. This is accompanied by a wonderfully cynical teenage look, which actually has comments about everything. The interaction with her teacher (Woody Harrelson), who is not inferior to cynicism, puts everything in a wonderful perspective.

As ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ progresses, a time span in which Nadine’s behavior changes little, the cynicism slowly turns to lethargy. The adolescent would rather wallow in self-pity than do something about her life. She rejects her problems, instead of solving them. She rejects everyone and everything, without giving anything in return. That passive predictability gets boring in the long run. The cover, the film ends all American on a positive note, comes too late. ‘The Edge of Seventeen’, however unrealistic, deserved quite a bit more fairytale-like inspired by makeability.