The Edge of Seventeen, The Eagle Huntress
Wit, honesty and the star’s amazing disappearing act infuse a teen drama with intelligence.
Not since Juno have we seen a teenager so equally erudite and out of her depth. Nadine, the fashionably uncool hero of The Edge of Seventeen played by Hailee Steinfeld, isn’t burdened by pregnancy but is instead weighed down by the regular adolescent anxiety of feeling completely unloved. Her tender father died a few years ago. Her mother (Kyra Sedgwick) has more neuroses than a Woody Allen archetype. Above all, Nadine’s best and only friend has taken up with her do-gooder hunk brother (Blake Jenner). This is why, at the beginning of the film, she careens into her history teacher’s classroom and with lightspeed delivery announces her intentions: “I’m going to kill myself … I’m probably gonna jump off an overpass in front of a semi, or a U-Haul maybe. Just not a bus – I’m not gonna be a dick and make people watch.”
This bluster is something of a front. Absurdly funny as it might be, it is an angry face that Nadine must paint to engage with the world. Underneath, anxiety and self-doubt are all-consuming.
Some supremely awkward fumbling might have you wincing in recognition.
In her quietest moments, alone and with only prescription medication for company, we are given a glimpse of a deeper illness.
On paper, it looks like a parade of unbearable moping. And yet The
Edge of Seventeen is careful to avoid dull introspection. Often, scenes of exasperation are resolved by a dry exchange of wit. Or, in the case of gangly love interest Erwin (Hayden Szeto), some supremely awkward fumbling, which might have you wincing in recognition.
The intelligence of the film (Kelly Fremon Craig’s feature debut) is in its piercing honesty – something Juno smothered in heavy irony. At the height of her anxiety and confusion, Nadine is rather cruel, even abusively so. We might pass this off as the desperate flailing of adolescent crisis, yet the film places us so firmly inside her conflicted mind that, at the very least, we understand why she lashes out with such resentment.
Balancing these opposite moods, flashing between acerbic iconoclasm and aching vulnerability, is the singular force of 20-year-old Steinfeld. She possesses that rarest gift in cinema: the ability to utterly disappear into a role. With beguiling naturalness, ease and astonishing range, she commands every inch of the screen.
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