The bible belt of early 1960s rural Oklahoma wasn’t a great time and place in America for outsiders. And this god-fearing country is certainly no place for two girls that may be slowly falling in love and calling too much public attention to all the time they’re spending together. Director Martha Stephens (co-director of 2014 Sundance film “Land Ho!” with Aaron Katz) adapts Shannon Bradley-Colleary‘s screenplay on intolerance and class-warfare in pre-sexual revolution America into an artfully visual feast, but one that unfortunately plods along at an uneven pace into heavy-handedness as the drama intensifies. It’s a missed opportunity for something more poignant.
The lead in the small-town Oklahoma of “To The Stars” is a mousy, bookish misfit by the name of Iris Deerborne (Kara Hayward of “Moonrise Kingdom”), whose alcoholic, overprotective and unhappily married mother (Jordana Spiro of Netflix’s “Ozark”) is a selfish mess, and even tries to hook up with a local high school student to boost her self-image and cling to the ideas of her youth. No wonder dad (Shea Whigham) would rather spend his time at the family ranch than at home.
The awkward outcast at school, Iris has no real friends and a debilitating bladder problem that earns her the unfortunate nickname of “Stinky Drawers,” and causes her to wet her pants in public on multiple occasions, which only makes her pariah status worse (this is a bit much). Things transform and blossom, however, when a charming new student to the school, Maggie Richmond (Liana Liberato), a pretty, no-nonsense, but enigmatic girl, turns up, and Iris finds herself drawn to her.
Maggie lies to her classmates, claiming that her father is a famous Life Magazine photographer, who even shot Marilyn Monroe, and the movie suggests her parents (Malin Akerman, Tony Hale) moved to this small town to escape and get a “fresh start” for their daughter. Luckily for Iris, she’s not invisible to Maggie who sees something in her, the two girls form a bond, and this eventually alters her untouchable social status; even the mean girls in school soon want to befriend her.
Feeding off each other’s energies, the two girls start adopting challenging notions of how a woman should behave in that era. Maggie’s vivacious presence is transformative and she ends up breeding confidence in Iris who then suddenly becomes sexually liberated, hooking up with local farm boys and school classmates like Jeff (Lucas Jade Zumann). Of course, it turns out that Maggie is harboring a major secret, one likely responsible for her parents uprooting her to a small town and this will soon cause much melodrama, much of which feels clichéd and overdone.
“To the Stars” possesses some moments of pure lyrical beauty and many of the shots conceived by Stephens clearly make a case for her talents behind the camera, aided by Andrew Reed‘s photography, which was in sumptuous black and white a year ago, back when I had seen it at Sundance, but is now in color, no doubt due to the distributor pushing Stephens for a more commercial look. There’s also a clear resemblance to Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece “The Last Picture Show” which dealt with similar terrain and was also in black and white. It’s a real shame, if you ask me, I would have probably given this film a slight passing grade just for the wonderful mood the B&W conveyed in its original version. The decision to shoot this film sans color was a tremendously evocative one, giving Stephens’ film a timeless quality and, in fact, masking some of its flaws.
However, despite the original rich visual schema, the film is filled with coming-of-age platitudes that double-down on the conventional. Iris’ rise from outcast to the popular girl is particularly irksome because it’s set up in a way that you know is doomed to fail. One particularly phony makeover scene—the introvert flirting with the idea of flowering into something more effervescent for the sake of acceptance—is tiresomely banal because the movie has already explained to us this is not who she is. We know she’ll come to terms with this in the next scene, but this telegraphed cliché is frustratingly unnecessary.
Unfortunately, the tropes of intolerance and outrage—there’s practically a scene with flaming pitchforks over the vague idea that two girls might like each other— are too facile and unconvincing and the “villains” of the film, such that there are any, are finger-wagging caricatures.
The meaningful topics of female sexual expression, repression, and desire for acceptance that “To the Stars” portrays are relevant, but it’s a shame they’re not more poignant and persuasive. “To The Stars” reminds us that for all the progress we’ve made as a culture, we still have so much far to go. Too bad then that it’s packaged with such soap opera dimensions by Stephens, who unfortunately resists the urge to dig deeper than the surface. There’s a luminous tenderness in Stephens movie and it aims at the particularly salient idea of quiet, subjugated, female discontent, but it ultimately proves too slight, too contrived and never truly takes flight. [C]