Hailee Steinfeld and Hayden Szeto in The Edge of Seventeen. It starts out looking like any other teen comedy, but keeps revealing surprising depths and turning tropes on their noses. The Edge of Seventeen is a delightful and honest teen comedy with a mature soul, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (who also wrote the Alexis Bledel coming-of-age comedy Post Grad).
#EDGE OF SEVENTEEN FULL#
The Edge of Seventeen is full of familiar characters, but with surprising depths And The Edge of Seventeen is a great argument for this kind of writing. But cool and thoughtful and responsible grown-ups don't just come off as fresh and interesting - they pull complexity out of the teen characters as well. There's a lot of fun in the adult caricatures - and certainly most of us see our parents one-dimensionally when we're rolling our eyes at them. The bag has been mixed since then, but there's an observable nudge away from "adults are stupid" and toward a "parents are people too" ethic - this summer's Netflix smash hit Stranger Things, which borrows heavily from 1980s pop culture but remixes it, put the two side by side, with Barb’s mostly disconnected parents contrasted with Winona Ryder’s passionate refusal to give up looking for her son. Three years later we got Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci playing Emma Stone's parents in Easy A, easily the best parents ever onscreen and I will brook no further argument. In 2007 we got Juno, which has both terrible adults and some good ones. These comedies star teenage characters, but in the background they’re protest films, ragging on the narcissism and hypocrisy of parents, teachers, and principals.Ībout a decade ago, someone threw a wrench into this well-oiled machine. Mean Girls (2004) has well-meaning parents and teachers, but the life lessons are still up to the kids. Teen comedies like Bring It On (2000) and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) keep things light but are almost exclusively concerned with rich kids running amok while their parents are off doing something else. The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off are tinged with magical realism, seen through the eyes of the teen who's got the grown-ups' number Heathers (1988) is a very dark comedy with the trappings of a revenge thriller, and the adults are basically nowhere to be seen.
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