I came across Uptown Girls on a random TikTok video , you know this fifteen seconds long clip that makes you pause while you are just scrolling and then you are like, "Wait, what movie is this? So that same night I downloaded it am decided to watch it this afternoon and let me tell you, no regrets.
Molly Gunn is the daughter of a deceased rock star who lives off of her father's financial and memorial legacy, and is still throwing birthday parties years after his death, she always dresses like she went to ramsack a costume shop, the story changes when her manager empties her of what she has, and she goes broke, really broke, for the first time in her grown up life. So she becomes a nanny for an 8 year old girl named Ray, who is precisely the opposite of her in every way that counts a clean freak, health care obsessed, schedules obsessed, basically living her life because her mother, a record executive, is too busy to notice her, her mother feels she has her shit put together, but nag... two individuals who refuse in their own way to grow up, One refusing by remaining a child forever, and the other refusing by never being a child.
Now here's my twist, because everybody who reviews this movie does the same thing they call it a "quirky odd couple comedy" and move on, that's lazy. What nobody wants to sit with is that this is actually a grief movie wearing a nanny movie's clothes, Molly is not only broke, but she's stuck, she has stuck since her father's death and the money is the reason why she is stuck in comfort, The loss was not the disaster, the assistance she needed and didn't ask for. And Ray is nothing if not "uptight kid learns to have fun" Ray is a kid whose mother chooses to work so much that she created a fortress of rules to feel some control over something, These are two people parenting themselves badly, and they end up parenting each other into something healthier by accident.
Hence the ending is different from what the trailer had implied. It's not to say "wild woman teaches sheltered girl to loosen up" but to say that two broken people come together in the middle and neither one of them is fixing the other one, they are just witnessing them. Brittany Murphy's Molly is this type of chaotic character that never feels like a performance, you feel she's lost, not quirky-lost, lost,And Dakota Fanning, eight years old at the time, is doing work in this movie that actors twice her age would struggle with, there's a scene where she just watches her mother lie to her, and the stillness on her face says more than a monologue could have.
Is this film a perfect film? No It's not overly dynamic at mid-point, a few of the “wacky rich girl” set pieces are filler between the real moments, and a couple of characters on the side have no real purpose other than to advance the plot, but, I wasn't watching this for perfection actually, there were enough good parts to carry the bad ones on their backs, and I watched it because of this.
What I loved most is that it never moralizes at you, it does not sit you down and explain the lesson, It just lets you watch two people slowly stop performing for each other and start actually seeing each other, and lets you draw your own conclusion from that.
Rating: 100/100