I have found myself saying this quite often lately, but here we have another movie that takes some very familiar elements and blends them in a way that allows them to feel relatively unique. Babyteeth has a married couple who are going through a rough patch, it has a young woman being quite captivated by the personality of someone who would be labelled as "from the wrong side of the tracks", and there's also a storyline about someone struggling to live a normal life while being affected by cancer.
Eliza Scanlen plays Milla Finlay, a schoolgirl unlikely to see full adulthood, thanks to the cancer attacking her body. Her parents (Anna, a musician, played by Essie Davis, and Henry, a psychiatrist, played by Ben Mendelsohn) are struggling to find the right balance between protecting their daughter and allowing her to enjoy all that she can in her life, which is why they end up being more patient and considerate when Milla brings home a new friend, an older drug dealer named Moses (Toby Wallace). A number of the main characters here use drugs for different reasons, but there might be a time when they can instead find their high/calibration in some other way.
The first, and only (at this time), film directed by Shannon Murphy, working from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejas, adapting her own play, Babyteeth is one of those little films that seems unremarkable, and perhaps even a bit trite, until you start to be won over by the power of the many effective moments scattered throughout the runtime. On the one hand, I wish someone had pared this down by a good 10-20 minutes (it clocks in close to the 2-hour mark). On the other hand, there are no scenes I would necessarily vote to throw on the scrapheap. This is a story that is crafted well and lifted up by a great cast.
Davis and Mendelsohn are almost so appreciated nowadays that it seems redundant to praise their performances, but they absolutely make the most of material that gives them great individual moments, as well as some great moments together. There's no way to single one of them out, and they somehow manage to even take things up a notch in some powerful final scenes. Scanlen is perfect in her role, managing to convey her positivity and quirkiness without being stuck in a "manic pixie dream girl" rut. The constant presence of her cancer works against that, of course, but that shouldn't take away from how well she pitches her performance. Then we have Wallace, giving the kind of performance that makes me immediately want to check out more from his already-surprisingly-expansive filmography. Emily Barclay also does well to make a strong impression with her relatively small amount of screentime.
I enjoyed Babyteeth for every minute of the runtime. It sets everything up quickly enough, allowing viewers to spend most of their time watching the main characters connecting and interacting in both good and bad ways. The best thing about it is the way that it seems to hold back from judging people who find themselves in an unimaginably difficult situation, creating space and time for self-reflection as we ponder the beauty and ugliness of a universe that contains more wonders and delights than any of us could hope to see in a century, never mind whatever limited lifespan we're allotted by a cosmic roll of the dice.
9/10
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