If you read my Top 15 Movies of 2016 list, then you’ll know that at the very top (number 0) was The Edge of Seventeen. Also worth noting: my favorite movie of ever continues to be Joseph Kahn’s Detention. From that, we can deduce the following: modern films about high school drama told from the female perspective resonate with me. For whatever reason.
So I was excited to see Before I Fall, which, based on the trailer that played before each of the three times I saw The Edge of Seventeen in theaters seemed like Groundhog Day but in high school and more overtly sad. And I was in. I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t be good, especially when I saw the middling first reviews, but it didn’t stop me from jumping on the first press screening I saw. I really, really wanted it to be good.
And, thankfully, it was.
Before I Fall
Director: Ry Russo-Young
Release Date:
Rating: PG-13
Up front (well, after the intro): I did not like the first third of Before I Fall. There are a variety of potential reasons for this, though most of them boil down to an inability to connect to the characters. They’re popular girls; it’s like a modern version of Mean Girls but without the funny. They’re just terrible. And with a lack of humor, I had nothing to latch onto. I was never a teenage girl, but it’s less that than the fact that I was never a popular teenager of any gender. I just simply couldn’t relate. So, I was upset, because I wanted to like it, and the film was just making it so hard.
But then things changed. Before I Fall‘s conceit is that its protagonist, Samantha (Zoey Deutch), dies in a car crash and then wakes up at the beginning of the same day. And even when she doesn’t die in the car crash, she still wakes up the same day. It’s “Cupid Day,” a semi-bizarre variation on Valentine’s Day. I’ve never heard anyone call it Cupid Day before, and at first I thought maybe it was a Pacific Northwest thing, since that’s where the film is set, but apparently not; it comes from the book (which was actually set in New England). Looking up “Cupid Day” on Google brings up as its first result a question on Yahoo Answers specifically asking about its use in the book upon which this film is based (look at all the research I did for this review!).
Still, it’s definitely Valentine’s Day because someone is like, “Happy Cupid Day” and someone else is like “THAT’S VALENTINE’S DAY TO YOU” and I dunno if that part was in the book. It felt kinda expository, like the moment was only there for the purpose of clarification… but whatever. Point is, its Cupid Day and that’s what everyone says. (It’s best not to get hung up on things like that.)
We see the day play out. We see Samantha and her friends as garbage people. We see that there’s something in Samantha that could be not garbage, but that only matters so much when she also shouts that the sad girl is a “Psycho.” She piles on like everyone else. She’s still a bad person. And then she dies, and she spends the rest of the film atoning for that sin.
Her first repeated day is whatever. I knew the conceit, so I more-or-less knew how it was gonna go down. She was still not a good person, but she was a not-good person who was starting her transition. But even if those glimmers of worthwhileness began around here, she was still fundamentally not worth caring about.
I don’t remember if it’s the next day or the one after, but at some point she decides to dress differently. She dresses like a goth kid. She wears all black, gets all made up, and then she starts speaking her mind to people. She calls out her friends on their shit. She then has a really awkward interaction with her teacher (I cringe just thinking about it), and she does it all because she has realized that it doesn’t matter. That she is going to wake up the next day the same as ever. So why not be a different her for a day (maybe one that’s closer to the real her? At this point, we don’t actually know, though the answer seems to be “not quite” (though that begs the question of why she had those clothes in the first place))?
And that was interesting, of course, because we see different sides of the character, but it wasn’t even that that did it for me; she goes in to the bathroom that I guess has been designated the one lesbian girl’s bathroom, and then the two of them talk. And the talk that they have is genuinely interesting. It wasn’t just showing more of Samantha, though it did do that; it was making a point about everything that those characters were. To paraphrase (because I didn’t write down the actual line): “In two years, I won’t remember any of you.” And you look at Samantha’s friends, the popular kids, and you think about where they’re going to be in two years. After high school: Will they Matter? Will anyone remember them? The sickest parties and the cutest boys in high school are, one would assume, chump change compared to what’s to come. But that’s what they care about. Being cool. People thinking their cool. And the people who are actually cool are just biding their time until they don’t have to deal with that shit anymore.
(They’ll have to deal with other shit, but that’s not the point.)
At that point, it becomes like a different movie, a movie about misfits. Because the truth is that, though Samantha somehow joined up with the popular girls, it’s not really who she is. She isn’t as “weird” as some of the people are, but she’s definitely a lot less judgmental of oddities than she puts on. And as Before I Fall begins to explore that, it’s suddenly like watching a different, much better movie. Samantha became multi-faceted, and her relationships became compelling. What happens with the family I found to be particularly feels-worthy, and it was this stuff, actually, that made me cry.
Yeah. Before I Fall made me cry. And it wasn’t like a cheap thing either. They didn’t have to kill a cute animal (or even a person); they just had to start to mend something that was on the verge of being broken. I have a sister who is quite a bit younger than I am. I was definitely dismissive of her in the way that Samantha is of hers. But Samantha, as the day repeats and repeats, decides to own up to this and try to make things better. I felt that so freaking hard. (After the film ended, I immediately texted my sister to tell her I loved her.)
And it wasn’t just that. Many of the character arcs pay off in ways that feel honest in an almost surprising way, because sometimes the ways they get to those conclusions don’t make a lot of sense. Certain characters do things that seem out of place, but where they end up as a result of them still works. It could be an adaptation thing: In the pages of the book, there is more time to get a character from A to B to C and so on, but we have to skip a few letters to get it into a film. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t ultimately matter. What matters is how it feels right. Very right.
In the first third of the film, I was just thinking, “Man, I want to go home and watch The Edge of Seventeen again.” And, admittedly, I think that a lot, but after the switch, I thought, “No… this is the only thing I want to be watching. This is the thing that matters.” And it does matter, because it really does get into some of the seedier aspects of high school popularity, and the gross things people do in order to move up a level.
Also, it made me cry.
