Hollywood hypocrisy

Instead of going to college, we see Drew Barrymore's Bev whine to her mother that her 2-year-old son won't leave her alone while she is studying for her GED. We see her lose a college scholarship because her junkie husband doesn't show up to babysit, and she has to drag her 3-year-old to the interview. (A voice-over from her grown-up son, who inexplicably is the omniscient narrator of a film based on a book written by his mother, solemnly intones: "It's family legend and a huge deal in her book the day she didn't get her scholarship. But to me, it's not about how Ray [her husband] let her down, but how my mere presence at the age of three was enough to cost her her scholarship.")

We see Bev's hopes dashed again when she is 22 and her husband buys drugs with their savings, which they planned to use to move to California where Beverly could attend Berkeley. We see her mooning around, conferring the kind of reverence usually reserved for minor deities on friends who have achieved her "dream" -- a college education at NYU, followed by a master's degree and a life as a writer in New York City.

Every one of these scenes, as far as I can tell, is fabricated by a scriptwriter who seems hellbent on turning a story of success into one of failure. The real Beverly Donofrio, according to her memoir, never studied for her GED with a 2-year-old; she became pregnant at 17 -- not 15, as the movie suggests -- and she finished up high school while pregnant. The lost scholarship is not a huge deal in her book: Like an earlier quote in the movie, supposedly taken from the book -- "Life is really only four or five big days that change everything" -- it isn't there at all.

Also according to the memoir, the money that Ray blew on junk was earmarked for a Harley. (The young Bev really dug motorcycles.) And the only time she mentions California is in a passage in which she is writing about how "really happy" she and her best friend, also a teenage mother, are during the period they live together with their children: "True, we both had failed marriages," she writes. "True, we were both on welfare. True, we had little kids keeping us from hitchhiking to California or through Europe, joining a commune, and about a million other things we could be doing in the world, but here we were, best girlfriends living together with our kids." (The movie skips this part, and most definitely never shows the Barrymore Bev on welfare.)

And Beverly Donofrio earned her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan and her master's degree in creative writing from Columbia, both arguably better schools than NYU, at least if one goes by the ranking systems in US News and World Report (which the status-grubbing movie-version Bev most certainly would have done).

The revisionism committed by director Marshall and her scriptwriter, Morgan Upton Ward, goes beyond the usual dumbing down we've come to expect anytime Hollywood gets its hands on a well-written book. It was not simply a matter of cobbling together composite characters, condensing scenes or simplifying dialogue. Instead, Marshall and Ward have taken the true story of a scrappy working-class girl who gets knocked up, smokes pot and rides around enjoying her youth until she decides it's time to get herself together, and have turned it into the story of a bitter, failed teenage mother who blames her kid (parents and husband) for everything bad that happens to her, and manages, not surprisingly, to wreck her own life and that of her son.

Next Page: What is so threatening about a teenage mother who goes to a good college and raises a good kid?

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