Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Ken Kwapis
Cast :
Amber Tamblyn……….Tibby
Alexis Bledel……….Lena
America Ferrera……….Carmen
Blake Lively……….Bridget
Jenna Boyd……….Bailey
Bradley Whitford……….Al
Nancy Travis……….Lydia Rodman
Rachel Ticotin……….Carmen’s Mother
Mike Vogel……….Eric
Michael Rady……….Kostas
Leonardo Nam……….Brian McBrian
Maria Konstadarou……….Yia Yia
George Touliatos……….Papou
Kyle Schmid……….Paul Rodman
Erica Hubbard……….Soccer Pal Diana
Slowly but surely the next generation of talented actresses is starting to rise from beneath the ashes of the elder generation. Almost 20 years after Mystic Pizza proved a fertile launching ground for the career of Julia Roberts (as well as the big-screen debut of Matt Damon), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants features the most talented group of young women in the past decade in one major motion picture.
Based off a book by the same name written by Anne Brashares, Sisterhood follows four best friends during their summer apart: Tibby, Lena, Bridget and Carmen.
Tibby (Amber Tamblyn from television’s Joan of Arcadia) is working at a Target clone, filming her own video in an attempt at trying to showcase some sort of grand vision about life. She is assisted by Bailey (Jenna Boyd), a girl who manages to force her way into being her assistant.
Lena, played by Alexis Bidel, is visiting her family in Greece. This marks the third film that Bidel, star of TV’s Gilmore Girls, has appeared in this year (Bride and Prejudice and Sin City). Lena meets a boy her family disapproves of.
Blake Lively (in her second movie role ever) takes on the role of Bridget; she is the athlete of the group, spending her summer in Mexico at a soccer camp. Bridget has a romantic liaison of her own with a coach at her camp.
America Ferrera, who first caught the public eye in the coming of age movie Real Women Have Curves, rounds out the cast as Carmen. Carmen is spending the summer with her father and is thrown for a loop when his brand new family is introduced into the equation.
United by a pair of blue jeans that somehow manages to fit the unique body type of each, this is a story that could have resorted to a lot of the sort of comedy from unintelligent teen comedies like American Pie and the imitators it spawned. The blue jeans are mailed to each location after a (certain amount of time) and serve as the story’s main driving arc. We get to visit each girl for an allotted time (they each have a week with the pants) and each story progresses further once each girl gets her respective turn with the pants.
As a plot device, it works well. There is just enough time to develop the story arc for each girl without losing focus of the other three storylines as well. But the movie’s only real flaw is that it doesn’t allow enough screen time for Bridget or Tibby, focusing more on Lena and Carmen. While Bidel and Ferrera more than carry their fair share of the movie, and being the two more veteran hands it is understandable that they would be focused on more, the movie feels slightly incomplete. Bridget’s story is rushed at times while Tibby gets the cursory treatment to hers at times as well.
The movie does have quality direction from Ken Kwapis. In an ensemble movie with lots of moving parts, he has crafted a good story about the changes in life that affect the outcome of life. The movie does suffer at times from slow spots in the second act and some pacing issues with Bridget’s story arc, but the movie as a whole is good enough to compensate for it. Lively is the least experienced actress in the group and is given less meaningful screen time than her peers; her story feels incomplete, as we are given four characters that are well-developed but one with a story that isn’t.
Sister of the Traveling Pants is a movie about the sort of changes that occur between youth and adulthood; it’s also a lot more intelligent than teen movies about change have been in the past decade. The cast really helps bring this movie alive. There is a strong chemistry between the four that radiates off the screen; there is a strong sense that these four are (or could be, at least) good friends. They have a natural timing with one another that is hard to duplicate. All four characters have interesting personality quirks that normally would drive people apart from being friends and turn them into the bonds that unite them.
Kwapis allows them the freedom to really step into their roles; Ferrera, Lively, Bidel and Tamblyn breathe their characters in a way that second rate teen movies like Road Trip and American Pie can’t come close to matching in any respect. They aren’t superficial characters who you can summarize in a quick sentence in order to understand them; the sort of depth they are given and the type of story they are crafted into is gripping and involving.
