Mark Reviews Movies: BABYTEETH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 18, 2020

Without giving away the specific details, the final scene of Babyteeth is surprisingly affecting. The surprise comes, not only from the scene's serene and bittersweet simplicity, but also from the movie's previous unwillingness to deal directly with the story's main thrust and how the characters respond to it. That's not an entirely fair observation, since Rita Kalnejais' screenplay is mostly about how these characters react to the illness of one of their own. The reaction, though, is uniformly one of a combination of avoidance, denial, and distance.

It's an honest response, to be sure, but Kalnejais and director Shannon Murphy add a secondary level to it. These characters aren't just avoiding, in denial of, and keeping emotionally distant from the difficult truth. They're also overloaded with assorted emotional and psychological baggage. Throughout the movie, those characteristics seem more important to the filmmakers than the real story happening right in front of them.

It all begins with a chance encounter on a train platform between Milla (Eliza Scanlen), a teenage girl, and Moses (Toby Wallace), a guy in his early 20s. The girl is instantly smitten with the stranger, who holds her in his arms on the ground and offers his shirt when her nose suddenly begins bleeding.

His intentions are questionable from the start: For all of that care and attention, Moses ultimately asks Milla for some money, since he was recently kicked out of his home. As it turns out, Moses was living with his mother and younger brother, until the mother got fed up with her elder son's propensity for getting into trouble—mostly selling prescription drugs. Milla agrees, as long as he'll cut her hair in a much shorter style.

The key revelation, downplayed as much of the story's major points are, is that Milla has some form of cancer (The movie's key scenes are introduced with on-screenplay titles, and that detail arrives with one called "Chemo"). Nobody really talks about it, even though the signs—the treatments, the medication, and Milla's shaved head (If any of this is seen, it's brief, and Milla wears wigs for most of the movie)—are right in front of them.

The girl's father Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) is a psychiatrist who's distracted by work. Her mother Anna (Essie Davis) is a former musician. She stopped performing professionally when Milla was young, and now the mother won't play for pleasure—out of a superstitious belief that it's the only sacrifice she can offer the universe to save her daughter. Anna keeps her distance from reality with the help of anti-anxiety medication, prescribed by her husband.

Kalnejais' story concerns all of these characters as they try to go through the motions of life, while death hangs over their future. A lot happens, and a lot of that happens again and again, as Milla tries to romantically connect with Moses, Moses continues to get into trouble and intentionally or accidentally betray the girl's obvious affections for him, and the parents repeatedly have to tell off the older guy when their daughter isn't around, lest they be seen as the reason for his absence from her life.

The central idea here—that we maintain routines, whether they're beneficial or not, in the face of such potential despair—is sound. Milla keeps going to school and, in her interactions with Moses, seems to be thinking of at least some sort of future. Moses continues in his idling and possibly self-destructive ways, even stealing Milla's medication to make some cash (One understands the concept of keeping Moses an ambiguous figure, but his behavior, which is so selfish for so much of the story, seems to switch in the third act as quick act of redemption). Henry works and also has a clear attraction to a new, pregnant neighbor (played by Emily Barclay), in a subplot that, like a few here, is dismissed with as much awkwardness as it's introduced.

To the director's credit, Murphy and the cast play the material with a tone akin to a hush. Everything is low-key, restrained, and understated, or it is in terms of the actual filmmaking, at least. There's a sense of realism to the rhythm of the story, as well as the actors' performances (For all of the characters' troubles and eccentricities, no one here overplays them, resulting in some moments that do pack a punch, such as the way Mendelsohn plays Henry's final realization). Despite everything the screenplay does to highlight the broad strokes of the characters and to make us question the repetitive nature of the story, Murphy and the actors take the material seriously.

That, though, feels entirely at odds with the foundation of Kalnejais' material. Little about the characters or the complications here feels as realistic as the presentation of the characters and the story. That dichotomy adds a third layer of distancing to Babyteeth, as we watch characters, who are sometimes off-putting in their eccentric behavior, try to stay detached from reality, while the movie wants us to be invested in that reality. It's at least one layer too many.

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