This Friday sees the release of James Ponsoldt's "Smashed" follow-up, the tenderly drawn coming-of-age teen story "The Spectacular Now." Boasting standout performances from young leads Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, the film, which we reviewed out of Sundance and called"valuable and honest," evokes the growing pains of the unusually real-feeling central duo via a familiar conduit—the story of their first love. Romantics that we are at heart, we took this opportunity to sit on our sofas for a week with a bucket of ice cream and a pack of Kleenex, revisiting a slew of films that share that theme. Given the breadth of the field, we've done our best to concentrate on films that take first love as their primary theme, but it should be noted that it crops up as a subplot with astonishing frequency, too.
“My Girl”(1991)
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Friendships between boys and girls were always met with scorn in elementary school. A boy couldn’t be your friend without being your boyfriend (literally one of the most mortifying insults that could be hurled). “My Girl” taught girls that it’s more than acceptable to be friends with boys, and that sometimes they can be the best friends you’ll ever have. Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky, who will forever be associated with the coolest name in movie history) grows up in the 1960s with a father who runs a funeral parlor and without a mother, who died during her birth. The only reliable influence in Vada’s life is her neurotic best friend, Thomas J (Macaulay Culkin). The two navigate the morass of life and death, and throughout the film, Thomas J understands Vada and never judges her quirks; she’s a hypochondriac who visits the doctor daily. The two aren’t in love, and aside from a quick experimental kiss, they never talk about being in love with each other. No, Vada’s first love is her elementary school teacher (played adorably by Griffin Dunne who gave this writer unrealistic expectations about men for decades), but by the end, even Vada realizes what puppy love feels like. Since the movie is told through Vada’s eyes, we never learn whether Thomas J loves Vada; we have to judge him by his actions, and the fact he would do anything for her only makes the climax all the more heartbreaking (I won’t spoil it for you here, but it’s fairly traumatizing). “My Girl” taught young girls that love comes in all forms, whether romantic or platonic, and that ultimately the love of a best friend is the strongest bond of all.
“The Notebook” (2004)
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Friendships between boys and girls were always met with scorn in elementary school. A boy couldn’t be your friend without being your boyfriend (literally one of the most mortifying insults that could be hurled). “My Girl” taught girls that it’s more than acceptable to be friends with boys, and that sometimes they can be the best friends you’ll ever have. Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky, who will forever be associated with the coolest name in movie history) grows up in the 1960s with a father who runs a funeral parlor and without a mother, who died during her birth. The only reliable influence in Vada’s life is her neurotic best friend, Thomas J (Macaulay Culkin). The two navigate the morass of life and death, and throughout the film, Thomas J understands Vada and never judges her quirks; she’s a hypochondriac who visits the doctor daily. The two aren’t in love, and aside from a quick experimental kiss, they never talk about being in love with each other. No, Vada’s first love is her elementary school teacher (played adorably by Griffin Dunne who gave this writer unrealistic expectations about men for decades), but by the end, even Vada realizes what puppy love feels like. Since the movie is told through Vada’s eyes, we never learn whether Thomas J loves Vada; we have to judge him by his actions, and the fact he would do anything for her only makes the climax all the more heartbreaking (I won’t spoil it for you here, but it’s fairly traumatizing). “My Girl” taught young girls that love comes in all forms, whether romantic or platonic, and that ultimately the love of a best friend is the strongest bond of all.
“The Notebook” (2004)
Known to some as that embarrassing chick flick that Ryan Gosling made before became a worldlessly cool, toothpick-sucking vigilante, and to others as OMG the amazingly amazing story of a first love that survives everything, even senile dementia, “The Notebook” actually fizzled in theaters and really found its following on DVD. It’s so shamelessly manipulative that it’s almost shameful, but there is some gravitas brought by the older contingent of Gena Rowlands and James Garner, while Rachel McAdams and the absurdly youthful-looking Gosling are bursting with so much dewy beauty that it’s hard to stay mad at the film, no matter how cynical one’s heart. The Hallmark-style Nicholas Sparks story centers around prewar teenagers Allie and Noah (sometimes for Big Reveal purposes known as Duke), who fall in love but are separated by the machinations and letter-suppressing tactics of Allie’s snobbish parents. She eventually falls for a nice rich guy (perennial fifth wheel James Marsden), but has to choose between him and Noah when Noah reenters her life. *Spoiler alert* Of course, all of this is a story that the elderly Duke is relating to the ailing, rest-home-confined Allie in later life, and it’s in the final dance of these two, and the unbelievably sad evocation of the terrors of old-age memory loss, that the film actually did kick us in the tear duct. “The Notebook” has become famous for one thing (Gosling, swoon, etc), but its best moments come for quite another reason.
“Moonrise Kingdom” (2012)
With a stylized, aesthetically fetishized approach that nowadays attracts as many critics as fans, the insult that detractors are always ready to hurl at any new Wes Anderson movie is “style over substance.” But “Moonrise Kingdom” is a wonderful answer to that criticism—its look and setting (the never-never world-in-microcosm that is the island of New Penzance) are as uniquely Andersonian as anything he’s done, but the heart that beats beneath is universal and strangely insightful, especially for a film about a lisping boy scout who falls in love with a girl dressed as a bird. In fact, the journey of discovery and wonder that is falling in love for the first time, even as children, is perfect territory for Anderson’s ever playful sensibility, mooring his more whimsical flights of fancy to an emotional core that, while never so indulged as to become sickly, does give his style what it sometimes lacks—a certain, sweet purpose. The film swept past us in a delicious swirl of color and quirk and oddball detail, but what remained afterward was the warm heart that Anderson and his two scrupulously deadpan juvenile leads (Jared Gilman and Suzy Hayward) summoned. Here, the painstakingly assembled imagery may give “Moonrise Kingdom” its uniqueness, but the care for the characters and their completely batshit yet deeply-felt circumstances, gives it permanence.
"An Education" (2009)
One aspect of first loves that "An Education" dramatizes well is when you think that the relationship is one thing but it turns out to be something else. Such is the case when young Jenny (Carey Mulligan) falls in love with an older businessman named David (Peter Sarsgaard). Throughout the course of the movie, Jenny learns that David isn't what he appears to be (first some kind of shady con man, later already married) and the movie plays nicely with how these revelations affect the color of the relationship. The good parts, when she swooned with love, now seem tainted, while all of those people who warned her about her relationship with a much older man, and against rushing into something as serious as a relationship, have their opinions validated in retrospect and to Jenny's chagrin. "An Education," based on journalist Lynn Barber's memoir and adapted by novelist Nick Hornby, who excels in engaging in all the messy facets of first love and gets a number of awkward little moments wonderfully right, like when Jenny has David over for dinner with her parents (played by Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour). These are the small, delicate speed-bumps on the road to your first love that are rarely depicted, which is maybe why scenes like this resonate. Like any good first love, too, Jenny learns from her experience and it makes her a stronger, more dynamic woman in the end. It might have been her first love, but it certainly won't be her last, and not even close to her best.
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008)
An idle daydream that we all have (especially since we're forever linked, via the wonders of social media, with the ghosts of exes past) is the what-if concerning our first love. What if we could go back in time and fix things; or what if they were to come back to us, many years later? Would that spark, that compatibility, that specialness, still be there? These are some of the questions grappled with in David Fincher's deliriously decadent and oddly poignant "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," wherein Brad Pitt plays a man who ages backwards, starting out life as a withered old man and getting progressively younger, and Cate Blanchett as the woman who falls in love with him, while watching him literally deteriorate to young age. The most powerful section of the movie is when they "meet in the middle," when they're comparably the same age and have at least some hope of living a traditionally happy lifestyle. In an overblown way, their relationship is a metaphor for the way that people change and proof that even if first love is fleeting, the bonds it forms are forever and always, like a thick length of cable running just beneath the surface of your life. Fincher, who has no time for bullshit, makes the fantastical elements feel hauntingly real, and brings the emotional elements to vivid life, too.
More films about first love listed at the ( SOURCE )
Confessional post! Do you remember your first love, ONTD?
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