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Never Goin' Back
Aug. 20th, 2018 07:45 amAs the credits rolled on Never Goin’ Back, I got out my phone to check to make sure that the director, Augustine Frizzell, really was a woman. I thought Augustine was a woman’s name, but then again there was that male saint, right, and parts of this movie just seem so… well, male-gazey. Like the beginning sequence, where our main characters Angela and Jessie tussle on the floor wearing nothing but their t-shirts and underwear.
But Augustine Frizzell is in fact female, so I guess this is just an example of the way that the male gaze has seeped into our culture or something. And actually, by the time I got around to checking, it had almost ceased to matter: despite the voyeuristic beginning, by the end of the movie I was totally won over by Jessie and Angela’s total loyalty and unwavering dedication to each other.
The movie kicks off with Angela unveiling Jessie’s seventeenth birthday present: a weekend trip to the beach at Galveston. Jessie is psyched - despite their shared love of dolphins, neither of them have ever been to the beach - but also terrified. Will they be able to make their rent? They share a room in a rundown house across from a decaying strip mall anchored by a church in an old storefront. Neither set of parents are in the picture.
No worries, Angela assures her. She’s signed them up for every available shift at the restaurant where they work. (They’ve both dropped out of school, so that won’t get in the way.)
The canny viewer knows instantly that Jessie and Angela are going to miss those all-important shifts. Sure enough, shit goes wrong almost at once: the twosome end up in juvie for possession (they do a lot of drugs in this movie), and that’s only the beginning of a chain of events that make their Galveston beach escape seem ever more impossible.
This is a funny movie, but it’s a fragile sort of humor. As Jessie’s brother likes to remind her, Galveston’s beach is nothing special, and there’s real pathos in the the fact that the girls view it as an unattainable paradise. They have very little, and very little chance of ever getting anything better, and every chance in the world of losing what little they have; and while of course taking all those drugs only makes their lives more precarious, at the same time it’s hard to blame them. They’ve got to escape from the uncertainty of their lives somehow, and even a brief beach escape, it seems, is too much to hope for.
If I had known more about this movie, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it. It’s not just the male-gazy elements. There’s a vulgarity to the movie that would have put me off: like Pitch Perfect (although in completely different circumstances) there’s a climactic vomiting sequence. (And Never Goin’ Back doesn’t revel in the vomit the way Pitch Perfect does.)
But it’s stuck with me since I saw it. I find myself thinking about Jessie and Angela, and trying to imagine a brighter future for them. The movie ends on a blissful note - they do make it to the beach - but I want something better than grinding insecurity for them for the rest of their lives. Couldn’t they just live on the beach and watch dolphins forever?
***
Why are professional reviews often so incredibly slipshod? I’ve noticed this in reviews for other movies, but the reviews for Never Goin’ Back have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. One reviewer refers to Jessie as “Jordan” throughout his piece.
Admittedly, it’s otherwise one of the more thoughtful reviews - link here, if you’re interested - the reviewer has at least noticed that Jessie and Angela “were born broke and will probably die broke,” which escaped the reviewer on Variety, who opens his review with the astonishingly incorrect line, “When you’re 17, and white, and middle class in America, sometimes all that matters is what you’re doing next weekend.”
Describing Jessie and Angela as “middle class” is so aggressively wrong that I don’t understand how he extracted that interpretation from the movie. All other considerations aside - I feel like “ability to take a weekend getaway without falling into utter financial ruin” is surely a market of middle-class status - a couple of middle-class kids on the verge of eviction would at least consider calling Mom and Dad. The possibility would come up, if only to be dismissed.
And in fact Jessie’s brother has a middle-class friend they all like to make fun of because he’s living on his daddy’s money. He insists that his father cut him off, but his fancy juice bottles tell another story. If nothing else in the movie tells you that Jessie and Angela aren’t middle-class, the fact that they all treat this middle-class poser as a clear outsider ought to clue you in!
But Augustine Frizzell is in fact female, so I guess this is just an example of the way that the male gaze has seeped into our culture or something. And actually, by the time I got around to checking, it had almost ceased to matter: despite the voyeuristic beginning, by the end of the movie I was totally won over by Jessie and Angela’s total loyalty and unwavering dedication to each other.
The movie kicks off with Angela unveiling Jessie’s seventeenth birthday present: a weekend trip to the beach at Galveston. Jessie is psyched - despite their shared love of dolphins, neither of them have ever been to the beach - but also terrified. Will they be able to make their rent? They share a room in a rundown house across from a decaying strip mall anchored by a church in an old storefront. Neither set of parents are in the picture.
No worries, Angela assures her. She’s signed them up for every available shift at the restaurant where they work. (They’ve both dropped out of school, so that won’t get in the way.)
The canny viewer knows instantly that Jessie and Angela are going to miss those all-important shifts. Sure enough, shit goes wrong almost at once: the twosome end up in juvie for possession (they do a lot of drugs in this movie), and that’s only the beginning of a chain of events that make their Galveston beach escape seem ever more impossible.
This is a funny movie, but it’s a fragile sort of humor. As Jessie’s brother likes to remind her, Galveston’s beach is nothing special, and there’s real pathos in the the fact that the girls view it as an unattainable paradise. They have very little, and very little chance of ever getting anything better, and every chance in the world of losing what little they have; and while of course taking all those drugs only makes their lives more precarious, at the same time it’s hard to blame them. They’ve got to escape from the uncertainty of their lives somehow, and even a brief beach escape, it seems, is too much to hope for.
If I had known more about this movie, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it. It’s not just the male-gazy elements. There’s a vulgarity to the movie that would have put me off: like Pitch Perfect (although in completely different circumstances) there’s a climactic vomiting sequence. (And Never Goin’ Back doesn’t revel in the vomit the way Pitch Perfect does.)
But it’s stuck with me since I saw it. I find myself thinking about Jessie and Angela, and trying to imagine a brighter future for them. The movie ends on a blissful note - they do make it to the beach - but I want something better than grinding insecurity for them for the rest of their lives. Couldn’t they just live on the beach and watch dolphins forever?
***
Why are professional reviews often so incredibly slipshod? I’ve noticed this in reviews for other movies, but the reviews for Never Goin’ Back have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. One reviewer refers to Jessie as “Jordan” throughout his piece.
Admittedly, it’s otherwise one of the more thoughtful reviews - link here, if you’re interested - the reviewer has at least noticed that Jessie and Angela “were born broke and will probably die broke,” which escaped the reviewer on Variety, who opens his review with the astonishingly incorrect line, “When you’re 17, and white, and middle class in America, sometimes all that matters is what you’re doing next weekend.”
Describing Jessie and Angela as “middle class” is so aggressively wrong that I don’t understand how he extracted that interpretation from the movie. All other considerations aside - I feel like “ability to take a weekend getaway without falling into utter financial ruin” is surely a market of middle-class status - a couple of middle-class kids on the verge of eviction would at least consider calling Mom and Dad. The possibility would come up, if only to be dismissed.
And in fact Jessie’s brother has a middle-class friend they all like to make fun of because he’s living on his daddy’s money. He insists that his father cut him off, but his fancy juice bottles tell another story. If nothing else in the movie tells you that Jessie and Angela aren’t middle-class, the fact that they all treat this middle-class poser as a clear outsider ought to clue you in!
