The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

IMDB Rating : 7.5/10 ( as on 27.03.2017)

Everyone knows that growing up is hard, and life is no easier for high school junior Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), who is already at peak awkwardness when her all-star older brother Darian (Blake Jenner) starts dating her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson). All at once, Nadine feels more alone than ever, until the unexpected friendship of a thoughtful boy (Hayden Szeto) gives her a glimmer of hope that things just might not be so terrible after all.

Director: Kelly Fremon Craig

Writer: Kelly Fremon Craig

Stars: Hailee Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner

R | 1h 44min | Comedy, Drama

IMDB link Here

Not that we needed another teen comedy revolving around angsty white millennials, but here's The Edge of Seventeen anyway, and guess what? It's really, really good.

Fast, full-hearted and graced with a beautifully modulated lead turn by Hailee Steinfeld, the movie takes the risk of playing it straight and sincere — and the risk pays off. That doesn't mean this directorial debut from Kelly Fremon Craig, produced by James L. Brooks, isn't sporadically funny (it is) or doesn't sometimes strain to be clever (it does). But The Edge of Seventeen is considerably less arch and gimmick-driven — less edgy, for lack of a better word — than other recent entries in the sub-genre (including decent ones like Easy A). Instead, it coasts on brisk humor and clear-eyed empathy for its endearing, exasperating protagonist, neither brazenly satirizing her rather routine adolescent crises nor drowning them in acoustic-strumming earnestness. Taken on its own modest terms, the movie proves that sometimes all you need is a strong cast, a sturdy script and a director who knows when and how to stay out of the way.

The Edge of Seventeen may not be embraced by John Hughes nostalgists, but Steinfeld's Nadine is a direct descendant of Molly Ringwald's Samantha in Sixteen Candles — as well as of the marginalized heroines played by Winona Ryder in Heathers, Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You, Thora Birch in Ghost World and many others. Brimming with insecurities and hostilities, pathologically self-deprecating and, of course, far more appealing than she realizes, Nadine decided long ago that she was an outsider and has been wallowing in self-pity ever since.

Fremon Craig (whose main credit prior to this was as writer of the poorly received Post Grad) doesn't try anything big or bold visually, and that's fine; she knows how to keep things moving. Mercifully, she also doesn't pander: The kids in The Edge of Seventeen are plugged in and social-media-savvy, but we're not subjected to SMS exchanges floating across the screen or dialogue that sounds feverishly hip or focus-grouped.

The film's strength is how seriously it takes these people and their fragile emotions, even as it tweaks them for gentle laughs and ushers them toward predictable resolutions. And while the characters are all recognizable types, there's some fine shading within the outlines. Sedgwick's Mona, for example, isn't quite as self-absorbed as she looks; the actress has a quietly show-stopping little scene near the end where she struggles to draft just the right text message to her daughter.

In her juiciest role since the Coen brothers' True Grit (her Juliet in 2013's Romeo and Juliet is better forgotten), Steinfeld is alive to Nadine's rapidly swinging moods and shifting allegiances, but also to her essential goodness. That said, it's not always easy to like her. She's quick to hit below the belt ("I hope you get paralyzed," "Your head's too big for your body" and "You're a shitty teacher" are just a few of her greatest hits). But if by the end of The Edge of Seventeen Nadine hasn't miraculously turned into a sweetheart, she's at least learned to hold herself to higher standards and accept defeat with grace. In other words, she's earned our respect — as has the film.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

‘The Edge of Seventeen’ Takes Teenage Movies to a Higher Place

In the grand scheme of things, losing a trusted friendship is a painful blow, but it usually isn’t the end of the world. If you’re an unpopular teenager, however, and the interloper is a sibling, it can feel like that.

The personal nightmare of Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), the embattled heroine of Kelly Fremon Craig’s smart, achingly bittersweet comedy.

Ms. Steinfeld, who played Mattie Ross in the Coen brothers’ remake of “True Grit,” doesn’t shy away from venting her fury by answering any criticism with the most scorching insults she can muster. She manages a tricky balancing act, making Nadine simultaneously sympathetic and dislikable.

If “The Edge of Seventeen” were a run-of-the-mill high school melodrama, Krista would be revealed as a selfish, scheming vixen and Darian as an arrogant jerk. But they are smart, sensitive people who care about Nadine. Krista, with her sunny temperament and gentle disposition, has been the light of Nadine’s life since they were children, while Darian has assumed the role of a surrogate patriarch since the death of their father, Tom (Eric Keenleyside), from a heart attack.

To call “The Edge of Seventeen” one of the best films about high school kids in 25 years isn’t to say it’s a masterpiece. In its raw honesty, it barely begins to approach Marielle Heller’s far tougher, more realistic “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” whose sexually curious 15-year-old title character entices her mother’s boyfriend into a clandestine affair. But it can hold its own against “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Clueless” and other movies that have raised the bar on teenage movies.

As Nadine flails, she is ardently pursued by Erwin (Hayden Szeto), a handsome, polite Korean-American classmate and aspiring animator from a wealthy family and the only character who isn’t white. She is more interested in hooking up with Nick (Alexander Calvert), a wily dreamboat to whom she accidentally sends a sexually explicit text message. It is to the film’s enormous credit that her mistake doesn’t embroil Nadine in a humiliating sexting scandal.

Read full review at New York times

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

The Edge of Seventeen is a warm, John Hughes-style delight

A teen comedy of warmth, wisdom, perspicacity and real emotional clout? Weren’t these cancelled? The Edge of Seventeen, though set in a present day where a single ill-thought-through Facebook message could send your life into freefall, is also a throwback of sorts: not for nothing is that a Stevie Nicks reference in the title.

It’s hardly the first high school film of recent times that wants to channel John Hughes pictures of the 1980s. But it doesn’t do this with posters, T-shirts, mix-tapes, or all these cosmetic modes of homage. It does so with eloquent writing, and the most sure-footed characterisation the genre has seen in years.

The heroine is Nadine, played with eye-rolling verve by True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld, in a starring role that should send her soaring as surely as the (inferior) Easy A did for Emma Stone.

Debuting writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig builds a set of relationships around Nadine that get more detailed with every reel, and in every case more like one-on-one combat. The real trigger is when her brother Damian (Blake Jenner) – an optimistic jock she resents for his seemingly frictionless path through life – gets with Krista, in a drunken one-night stand which his sister has the misfortune to witness, first-hand and aghast.

Nadine’s sense of self, precarious as it is, tips over a cliff-edge at this development. The movie understands romantic desperation, with near-Austen-like sagacity, as a form of displacement for other problems, a sudden lunge for validation. So it is that Nadine turns to Facebook, in a cringe-to-your-toes moment of self-exposure, which will ring hideous bells, hopefully in extreme form, for anyone who has ever jumped the gun on a boy or a girl.

Steinfeld has one of the trickiest tasks befalling a fledgling star: to keep our sympathies while believably alienating everyone around her on screen. She flat-out aces the job, helped no end by a supporting cast all recoiling subtly and in stages – the rueful, straight-talking Harrelson is a joy, Jenner suggests a thoughtful reservoir of decency beneath his smug façade, and Richardson’s Krista is so sheepish it’s heartbreaking when their friendship gets put on ice.

Still, Hayden Szeto, a near-newcomer at the unlikely age of 31, just about tops the league, as a classmate of Nadine’s whose awkward overtures have the adorable quality of a dropped ball, constantly rolling out of reach. He’s called Erwin Kim, a name Nadine toys with as often as its owner, trying it out for size.

Watching Kelly Fremon Craig hand them a well-earned key, and another to everyone else in the locked chambers of Nadine’s existence, is pure, problem-solving romcom bliss, as if we’ve suddenly found the smartest new agony aunt in the business.

 Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

An abrasive teen you can grow to love

 Almost anyone can make a teen movie. Unfortunately most people that do produce variations on the same slang-slinging, colour-popping visual accompaniment to a Spotify playlist. It’s depressingly rare for a director to look beyond the teenager as a highly marketable brand and convincingly tap into the mess of insecurities, contradictions and swirling, unfocused surges of anger. Even more unusual is a film that manages to do all this and still be disarmingly funny. Which is why this terrific debut feature is such a refreshing addition to the genre.

In Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), we encounter the most abrasive, needy, solipsistic teen character since Anna Paquin’s lead in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. But unlike Lisa in Margaret, Nadine is sympathetic rather than pitiable. With her sharp wit and a verbal maturity which far exceeds her emotional age, Nadine feels like Juno written by an actual teen rather than an ironic hipster.

Using an elegant looping structure, the film starts with a cliffhanger – Nadine announces her intention to kill herself to her long-suffering teacher (Woody Harrelson, a deliciously deadpan foil to Steinfeld’s pinballing stream of consciousness). We then wind back to reveal the circumstances of Nadine’s despair: an unpopular loner with an all-star sports hero for a brother (Blake Jenner), she had one friend: Krista (Haley Lu Richardson). When her brother starts dating Krista, it’s the end of the world for Nadine.

A deftly handled and highly enjoyable package throughout, the film leaves us with two standout discoveries. One is writer and director Kelly Fremon Craig. Her work with the actors coaxes out some cherishable comedic moments, her music choices are spot-on and her writing is a dream. The second is Hayden Szeto, the young Chinese-Canadian actor who plays Erwin, the fellow student who is smitten with Nadine. His performance is a symphony of social anxiety, inarticulate longing and nerdy verbal tics. It’s a wonderfully funny star-making performance.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Teenagers, you might have heard, can be a bit of a handful. Feed them into the Hollywood-movie machine, though, and their problems usually get solved—broken friendships are healed, potential romances are consummated, important life lessons are learned. But the director Kelly Fremon Craig’s debut film The Edge of Seventeen feints away from every adolescent cliché to create something far more wholly realized. The result is a story of young adulthood that isn’t afraid to be abrasive and emotionally confusing, while also making space for rare instances of vulnerability and tenderness.

The Edge of Seventeen is a sharp portrait of a 17-year-old roiled by hormones and emotions. Craig is candid about what a nightmare her protagonist Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) can be. Nadine is prone to moments of cruelty or gracelessness, and proves at times to be incapable of self-awareness, despite her obvious intelligence. She’s frustrating, but she also feels like an authentic person, which makes it easy to be invested in her many misadventures throughout the school year. As an R-rated, small-budget dramedy, the movie might get buried in cinemas by a slew of Thanksgiving blockbusters, but it seems destined for a long shelf life as a young-adult classic.

Craig’s first stroke of genius is in not defining Nadine as any particular type of outcast. She’s just a little too acerbic to fit in, but she’s also clearly uninterested in modulating her personality to blend into the background.

Steinfeld helps Craig’s wonderful script along by giving a superb lead performance, one that finally delivers on the tremendous promise she showed in her Oscar-nominated turn in the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010). Where that movie’s vengeful Mattie Ross was stoic and single-minded, Nadine is passionate and misdirected. Steinfeld manages to powerfully convey Nadine’s emotions, even if the character herself isn’t always in touch with how she feels. Since the film is relatively light on plot, Steinfeld has to bear the burden of keeping The Edge of Seventeen compelling. She does so perfectly.

The supporting cast certainly helps—Jenner (who played a more charming doofus in Everybody Wants Some!! this year) is perfectly inscrutable as Nadine’s older brother, who’s frustrated with his sister’s mood swings. Woody Harrelson, handed the supreme cliché role of cliché roles (as the wise teacher Mr. Bruner), is a hilariously mean foil for Nadine as an educator whose compassion has been chipped away at by years of experience in the public-school system. As the straight-arrow Erwin, who’s clearly interested in Nadine but has no idea how to snap her out of her various reveries, Szeto is a delight, as well as a refreshing choice for a romantic lead in a genre that usually relegates Asian performers to sidekick roles.

But The Edge of Seventeen begins and ends with Nadine, the kind of character you might wish you could pull off the screen just to shake some sense into her. Craig builds out her emotional arc slowly but surely, contextualizing Nadine’s depression and her cynicism through flashbacks in a way that never feels patronizing. She’s unpredictable—and can be rude and insightful within the same sentence. But more than anything, she’s someone to root for, because she’s portrayed as a complex person, not as a representative for a whole demographic. This is a movie about a teen, first and foremost, rather than a “teen movie,” and that’s exactly what makes it feel like a peerless example for the genre.

Read full review at The Atlantic

In much of popular art—if not always in life—girls and young women are told over and over how much power they have over their own lives. But that power comes with a caveat: Young people, and not just women, who think the world owes them everything can also be incredibly cruel to one another and to their family members. They need time, and experience, to get the balance right. That’s what growing up, and branching out into the world around you, is all about.

In Kelly Fremon Craig’s radiantly funny and perceptive debut, The Edge of Seventeen, nobody gets off the hook, least of all the movie’s heroine, Hailee Steinfeld’s Nadine. There’s misbehavior and misunderstanding everywhere, and often Nadine, in particular, is the one you want to shake. That doesn’t make her unsympathetic: It merely makes her believable.

Writer-director Craig doesn’t flinch from the prickliness of Nadine’s character: We see how cavalierly Nadine treats the supersmart, supersweet classmate, Hayden Szeto’s Erwin, who develops a crush on her. Only the teacher in whom she confides, Mr. Bruner (played by a wonderfully deadpan Woody Harrelson), is able to jolt her out of her self-absorption—and that’s mostly because he pretty much ignores her, at least at first. Nadine is awful—but the more terrible her behavior, the more you feel for her, thanks largely to Steinfeld’s performance: She’s a thundercloud stomping around in sneakers, and still, she’s almost incandescent with promise. Even if you can’t excuse her behavior, you can still see glimmers of the person she’s on her way to becoming.

The Edge of Seventeen is particularly perceptive in how it deals with teenage sex—maybe even with sex in general. Even though Nadine has her sights set on the brooding school hottie, she toys with Erwin’s affection, almost without even realizing it. She invites herself to his houses for a dip in his swimming pool. He can’t believe his luck—he’s going to see her in a bathing suit! He feels luckier still when, after the two have splashed around a bit, like dolphins, she suggests they have sex—only to then laugh it off, because she doesn’t really mean it.Erwin is stung. “You don’t say that to a man,” he shoots back, and though Nadine looks slightly chastened, you can see she doesn’t quite get it—yet. In some ways The Edge of Seventeen seems like a typical coming-of-age story, but that’s only because there are so many ways in which coming of age is mundane and predictable. Craig and her actors, all of them wonderful, have freshened up the genre: As familiar as the basic story may be, it also hits some raw, nuanced notes. Nadine thinks she’s the center of the world, but she also feels she’s unworthy of it. It’s a moment of glory when she finally breaks out of both modes of thinking. Only then is she on the edge, and at the beginning, of everything.

Read full review at Time