‘Are you there God?’ Rachel McAdams, Abby Ryder Fortson in It’s Me, Margaret.’
Eleven-year-old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) finds her world falling apart when her parents, Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb (Benny Safdie), tell her they’re moving to New Jersey. Margaret dreads having to change schools and leave her grandmother, Sylvia (Kathy Bates), to whom she is particularly close.
are you there god It’s me, Margaret. (English)
director: Kelly Freeman Craig
mold: Rachel McAdams, Abby Ryder Fortson, Elle Graham, Benny Safdie, Kathy Bates
run-time: 106 minutes
Story: It’s a year of big changes for Margaret as she moves from New York to New Jersey, making new friends and learning about her body as well as religion.
However, once Simmons moved to New Jersey, Margaret realized that life in the country wasn’t so bad after all. Her neighbor and classmate, Nancy (Elle Graham), shows her the ropes and lets her join a secret club with her two best friends, Jenny (Amari Alexis Price) and Gretchen (Katherine Kupferr). The girls in the club discuss boys, bras, and periods, including Philip LeRoy (Zachary Brooks), the cutest boy in class who is adored by all the girls, and bad girl Laura Danker (Isole Young).
Margaret feels that she is not growing as fast as the others and she has this passionate conversation with God and pleads with a higher power to make her ‘normal’. When the new teacher at Margaret’s school, Mr. Benedict (Echo Kellum), asks the students to write about themselves, he is taken aback by Margaret’s writing that she hates religious holidays. Margaret explains that her Christian mother and Jewish father have decided not to celebrate religious holidays and let Margaret choose the religion she wants to adopt when she grows up. That doesn’t stop Sylvia and Barbara’s estranged parents Mary (Mia Dillon) and Paul (Gary Houston) from intervening.
Beautifully acted under the leadership of Forston, McAdams and Bates, are you there god It’s me, Margaret. This is a rare excellent adaptation of a well-known book. The period detail is tasteful, along with the choice of music.
Although set in 1970, the year that Judy Blume’s seminal work was published, are you there god It’s me, Margaret. Feels timeless. As author Jason Reynolds says in the excellent documentary, Judy Bloom Forever, “Judy didn’t write her books to be timeless. He wrote them to be contemporary, and they were so contemporary that they became classics.”
Growing pains do not change with time or location. And when Margaret negotiates the scary exciting world of heartache and hormones, we cheer her on, even as we find personal echoes in Margaret’s dilemmas and journey.
are you there god It’s me, Margaret. currently running in theaters