Riding in Cars with Boys

Released 2001
Stars Drew Barrymore, Steve Zahn, Mika Boorem, Brittany Murphy, Lorraine Bracco, Sara Gilbert
Directed by Catherine Breillat

"I'm 22, and I still haven't accepted that this is my life," says Beverly Donofrio (Drew Barrymore), the heroine of "Riding in Cars With Boys." She has a drunken and shiftless husband, a son from a teenage pregnancy, and a rundown house on a dead-end street in a section of town well known to the police. It doesn't help that her father is the chief of police. Her problems all started not from riding in cars with boys, but from parking in cars with boys, and getting pregnant.

Beverly has been a dutiful mother but not a wise one. No child can carry the burden of a parent's unhappiness, and a parent who demands that is practicing a form of abuse. Because the movie is honest enough to see that, "Riding in Cars With Boys" is brave--not the story of plucky Drew Barrymore struggling through poverty and divorce to become a best-selling author, but the story of a woman whose book, when it is published, will be small consolation.

A film like this is refreshing and startling in the way it cuts loose from formula and shows us confused lives we recognize. Hollywood tends to reduce stories like this to simplified redemption parables in which the noble woman emerges triumphant after a lifetime of surviving loser men. This movie is closer to the truth: A lot depends on what happens to you, and then a lot depends on how you let it affect you. Life has not been kind to Beverly, and Beverly has not been kind to life. Maybe there'll be another book in a few years where she sees how, in some ways, she can blame herself.

Summary by Roger Ebert

Click here to read my review. --Bill Alward