Rachel Simmons

“Preteendom” is a pretty amazing time for girls. It’s that point in between being an innocent little kid and developing into a mature, potentially sexy woman. It’s the freedom and confidence of childhood with much of the mature and clear-headed thinking of adulthood. It’s a great part of life to experience or observe—even as an audience member.

There’s an abundance of pre- and young teen girls in the movies this winter, something I should be excited about. In Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, Elle Fanning co-stars as a self-sufficient daughter of a wealthy, partying movie star. In the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit, Hailee Steinfeld is a headstrong fourteen year old heroine seeking to avenge her father’s death. Both movies center around preteen girls entering a male world—with True Grit, this world is Western cowboy culture, and with Somewhere it is the playboy, Hollywood life of bachelors—and both movies focus on the girls’ relationships with their fathers (or, in the case of True Grit, her father’s legacy).

Weirdly enough, after watching them, neither movie left me with that “Woohoo, girl-power!” feeling. Everyone around me was talking about the two actresses and their strong, powerful roles, and my hopes were high. I wanted to like the characters…really badly. I wanted to be thinking, “Now that’s some girl-power!” as the credits rolled. I was sadly disappointed.

Both Somewhere and True Grit attempt to capture the mystical moment of preteendom in girls’ lives through their female characters. But the makers of both movies got too caught up in the excitement surrounding the fact that both films star preteen female actresses, and forgot to give their characters any dimension whatsoever.

In Somewhere (better named Nowhere after the lack of plot and character development), this seems especially the case. Elle Fanning’s character physically epitomizes preteendom for girls: She is vivacious, slightly androgynous, and exudes faith in the world around her.

The problem is that Elle’s character stops at the description: preteen girl. While this is a fascinating time in a girl’s life, the simple existence of this age is not enough to create a character, or a person. Somewhere assumes that it’s enough to just watch Elle exist in this brief and charming age. This is unfortunate, because there is so much more Sofia Coppola could have done with Elle’s character. Instead, Somewhere ends up being the story of a one dimensional character—a pretty face to observe, but an offense to all of us who know how much more there is to preteen girlhood.

True Grit suffers from similar problems. To put it plainly, the character Mattie (she’s really more of a caricature) is annoying, impossible to relate to, and not at all believable. Yet, she is our protagonist, narrator, and victor in the story. Why would the Coen brothers create such a dislikable heroine? Either the Coen brothers were attempting to create a likeable character (something they obviously failed at) or they were interested in creating a joke of a character.

If we agree it’s the first option (likeable character), then the Coen brothers must have been hoping the audience would be so amazed by a girl acting in such bold and self-satisfied ways that we would simply forget her irritating and rude personality (something that I think would have been very apparent, had the character been male—simply because brave, arrogant, know-it-all characters are more often written into literature and film as males).

If the character is supposed to be a joke, then one has to assume that the Coen brothers believe headstrong, smart girls are something universally laughed at, and that the idea of a braided blowhard is so absurd it would send us all into hysterics. If this is a case, then the character is a parody of girlhood. I wonder if the Coen brothers believed we would root for her simply because she is a girl, despite the fact that her personality is grating. It’s almost as if we, as the audience, will be so preoccupied being pleasantly surprised that a fourteen year old girl can be smug and pushy, that we will forgive her for all her shortcomings, as well as the writers of the movie for their lack of background information on why she acts the way she does.

In many ways, both movies revolve around situation entirely: the idea that the situation in True Grit is funny is what makes it a comedy, while the concept that the situation in Somewhere is tragic is what makes it sad. Substitute “character is female” for “situation” in the previous sentence, and you get the full story.

It isn’t what happens in the films or the way the characters are portrayed that makes them exciting to people, it’s the fact that young girls have prominent roles. But what’s the point in getting excited about a minority recruit, if she isn’t given any real responsibility? In the modern world, female characters shouldn’t be considered a novelty, anyway. It’s almost as if Sofia Coppola and the Coen brothers were so proud of themselves for choosing to focus on girls, they forgot to depict girlhood.

Fiona Lowenstein is a high school junior, weekly guest blogger and Girls Leadership Institute alumna. Read more about her work here.

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