Review: Babyteeth Neatly Threads the Needle Between Tragedy and Comedy

Shannon Murphy’s stylized melodrama captures a terminally ill teenager raging against the dying of the light.

Babyteeth
Photo: IFC Films

A lucid teen melodrama that incorporates addiction, age-inappropriate romance, mental illness, and terminal disease into its plot without collapsing into a movie-of-the-week black hole, Shannon Murphy’s feature-length directorial debut, Babyteeth, neatly threads the needle between tragedy and comedy. The film follows Milla (Eliza Scanlen), a teenage cancer patient who’s mostly given up on life when Moses (Toby Wallace), a slightly older drug dealer, bumps into her on a train platform. For her, it’s deep crushing love at first swoon and a reason to keep getting up in the morning. For him, it’s having an adoring fan to goof around with—especially when he discovers that her father, Henry (Ben Mendelsohn), is a psychiatrist who happens to have lots of pharmaceuticals lying around.

Set in one of those leafy, earth-toned Australian suburbs where it seems like the 1970s never ended, Babyteeth is shot with a slightly woozy warmth that belies the darkness of Milla’s spiraling despair. When we meet her, Milla has already lost her hair to chemo, not to mention any sense of being able to live a carefree teenage life. The bomb that Moses’s appearance sets off in her life is something close to a remission. It’s as though she’s suddenly remembering that, yes, this is what life can be like. Bringing Moses back to her house like some new pet, she watches him hungrily, the camera gliding incessantly over his lanky body in an approximation of her gaze, all while her parents fret. “This is the worst possible parenting I can imagine,” mutters Milla’s chronically depressed mother, Anna (a wonderfully loopy Essie Davis), after she and Henry agree to let Moses move in with them as a last resort to keep Milla happy.

Not that we’ll fully understand what attracts Milla to this junkie. Opportunistic, possessive, and the owner of some truly awful tattoos, Moses appears mostly unremarkable and unworthy of a second glance from Milla but for a couple of factors. First, there’s his unwavering, oddly fascinated, and seemingly platonic attentiveness toward her. He looks at her with piercing clarity at a time when the world appears unable to perceive of her as anything but a walking illness, if it sees her at all. (A scene in which a classmate tries on Milla’s wig so she can cluelessly take a selfie while Milla cringes in embarrassment over her exposed baldness is wrenching in what it shows about the casual cruelties meted out to the underseen.) Second, Wallace brings an off-kilter balance of qualities to Moses not in Rita Kalnejais’s script, alternating a beaming bounciness and feral paranoia with an addict’s watchful greed.

Advertisement

To its credit, Babyteeth doesn’t waste much time trying to work out the reasons behind Moses and Milla’s odd dynamic, as it’s more interested in watching Milla rage against the dying of the light and impatiently lash out at those who tiptoe nervously around her illness. Milla isn’t so much in love with Moses as she wants to use him as a springboard back into some semblance of normalcy. Because of Milla’s fatalistic demeanor and the emotion-prodding cues of Murphy’s handsome and music-drenched visuals, what would otherwise seem like normal low-stakes adolescent hijinks—going out with the wrong kind of guy, staying out all night at a party, skipping school—takes on far greater importance.

Orbiting around the densely emotive core of Milla’s last stabs at life is a constellation of somewhat dull scenes with secondary characters. The majority of this material—comprising everything from Henry’s flirtation with a precociously pregnant neighbor girl to a secret divulged by Milla’s earthily world-weary violin teacher (Eugene Gilfedder)—is well-performed but dramatically beside the point. The further the film gets from Milla’s intense need to feel as much as possible before her time is up, the less purpose it seems to have. But in the end, the screenplay’s wry sensibility—Kalnejais breaks the story into chapters, many with sardonic titles like “A Little Bit High” or “Fuck This”—and appreciation for Milla’s determination to push back the encroaching void win out over those distractions.

Score: 
 Cast: Eliza Scanlen, Toby Wallace, Essie Davis, Ben Mendelsohn, Emily Barclay, Eugene Gilfedder  Director: Shannon Murphy  Screenwriter: Rita Kalnejais  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.