(Herb’s even-tempered response: “You know what got me off of temple? Going to temple.”) Barbara and Herb are nonreligious. If Barbara handles her daughter’s request for a bra with respectful if amused aplomb, she’s thrown by Margaret’s plan to go to “temple” with Sylvia. 1 interlocutor might be a God she’s not even sure exists. But its depths are captured in Margaret’s seeking, in the notion that her No. Puberty provides most of the movie’s outright and tender comedy.

(So is Janie Loomis.) Echo Kellum is understatedly winning as the new but sensitive sixth-grade teacher who picks up on Margaret’s response to a questionnaire - “I hate religious holidays” - and turns it into a yearlong assignment.

From the moment the soon-to-be sixth grader utters the movie’s first prayer - which ends with the entreaty, “Please don’t let New Jersey be too horrible” - Fortson’s Margaret proves to be a protagonist who is as incidentally funny as she is authentic.Ĭraig also broadens the novel’s reach. In her face, Margaret’s glimmers of dawning self-awareness and hurt ring true. Kathy Bates is Margaret’s paternal grandmother, Sylvia, of the aforementioned blurt.īut it is Abby Ryder Fortson who carries the day, or rather the school year.

Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie portray Margaret’s youthful parents, Barbara and Herb. Brooks assembled a cast that delivers the joys and blunders waiting at the edge of childhood but also touches on the pangs of other kinds of growing up. It doesn’t hurt that Craig and the producer James L. The director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig’s rendering of the book about puberty, family and nascent spirituality offers lessons in how a cherished object, when treated with tender and thoughtful regard, needn’t turn precious. And so begins the yearlong adventure at the heart of this pitch-perfect adaptation of the author Judy Blume’s “ Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” Why? Because she and her parents are moving to New Jersey, her grandmother blurts out before her folks can ease their only child into the news. It is 1970 and the almost-12-year-old Margaret Simon returns from summer camp to boxes strewn about her family’s jammed New York City apartment.

This tender land new york times review