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Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars With Boys heads through pity and straight to pitiful.
By STEVE PERSALL
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 18, 2001
Drew Barrymore is the wrong choice to portray the arc of a woman in Riding in Cars With Boys: too old to play 15 without appearing out of her element and too young to play 35 without looking like the 15-year-old playing dressup games. She gets the 20s just right, but the rest of Penny Marshall's movie is just wrong.
Riding in Cars With Boys is based on the autobiography of Beverly Donofrio, who got pregnant in high school, regretted it for too many years to be sympathetic and, judging from the end of the movie, still doesn't know if she likes being Mommy or not. Barrymore's bubbly personality can't mask the fact that Beverly isn't an easy person to like.
But, boy, how Marshall tries to shove Beverly's pain into our hearts. She's as unsubtle with pathos as her filmmaking father Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries) is with fairy tale comedy. No groan is left unturned as Beverly copes with her disenchanted parents (James Woods, Lorraine Bracco), a ne'er-do-well husband, Ray (Steve Zahn), and the belief that her son Jason only gets in her way.
Riding in Cars With Boys frames its pity with flashbacks while grown-up Jason is driving Beverly to meet Ray and have him sign a release so her book will be published. His heroin habit is a key element of the book and the movie, a detail Columbia Pictures leaves out of the movie's cheery ads. Marshall isn't the gritty filmmaker to handle such a subplot, and she isn't heartless enough to depict Beverly's reluctant motherhood as it should be shown.
Marshall just wants us to like the movie, beating back any resistance with misty moments and convenient misery. Crises arise, someone vents, and then it's on to another flashback, merely cinematic camouflage for an overly sentimental plot. This will be considered in certain circles to be a "chick flick," but women smarter than Beverly will also cringe.
Grade: C-
Director: Penny Marshall
Cast: Drew Barrymore, Steve Zahn, Brittany Murphy, James Woods, Lorraine Bracco, Adam Garcia
Screenplay: Morgan Upton Ward, based on the book by Beverly Donofrio
Rating: PG-13; profanity, sexual situations, drug abuse, mature themes
Running time: 131 min.