The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants: A Review

Mel and I watched The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants this week. This review is not intended as either an endorsement or a condemnation of the movie. I want to address two somewhat related ideas that the movie suggested to me.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

First, some background. The movie is based on a popular novel for girls, much like the well-known Princess Diaries. In this story, four teenage girls are preparing to spend their first ever summer apart from each other. Just before they separate, they find a pair of jeans that fits each of them perfectly, despite their obvious differences in size and shape. They agree to share the pants through the summer by mailing them to each other. Each then goes to her summer destination: one to Greece, one to South Carolina, one to Mexico, and one stays home in Maryland. The movie chronicles their experiences throughout the summer.

The script and the directing are generally pretty good. The story is not pedantic; we aren’t always told exactly what is going on, especially when it’s obvious. The solid acting performances help fill in some of the plot and much of the emotion. The photography is very nice. It’s not quite as if you could freeze any frame and print it, but many of the shots are well-composed and thoughtfully orchestrated without seeming “artsy.”

In a brief commentary on the DVD, three of the actresses decide that the movie is superior to many other girly movies because it is more realistic. Without spoiling the plot, I want to address that claim. It is true that the movie deals with more substantive issues than, say, the Princess Diaries. It is also more plausible, though plausibility is rarely a valid standard for a good story. But the actresses say that their movie is better because it doesn’t deal with trivialities like pimples and homework. And yet many teenage girls’ lives are largely consumed by similar trivialities, punctuated by more serious issues. This movie deals with those punctuation marks more than the mundane, which makes it in a sense less realistic. Good stories are not “realistic” in the trivial sense. They don’t trace the mundane.

It is interesting that the girls claim to have been friends for their entire lives, since their mothers took a birthing class together. But their parents never see each other throughout the rest of the film. Perhaps the book is different, but one wonders how four girls from such different backgrounds and having such different tastes could remain friends for so many years. Examining the set pieces in the movie provides some explanation. None of the girls lives in a shack—despite their attempt to seem like ordinary girls, one goes to Greece and the other to Mexico for the summer. Few girls would be able to afford that kind of opportunity.

The movie is supposed to present relevant issues realistically. The issues at stake are serious—divorce, suicide, terminal illness, and love are all directly addressed. But the results are fairly sentimental. It is a feel-good movie, for the most part. Ultimately the solution is unoriginal—be yourself, and enjoy your friends. And yet the friendship aspect gets the most attention, which mostly redeems the story from trite psychobabble. Decisions carry consequences, if relatively minor ones. Wrong actions fail to satisfy desires, and there is forgiveness for wrongdoing. The moral tone is soft and very modern, but not as far off-base as some stories in this genre.

My second thought was that this story wouldn’t make any sense if the characters were boys. Of course, some of the details would have to change, but are their any stories out there about four teenage boys and their friendship? I can’t think of any. I suspect that any such story would devolve into coarse language, rude humor, and over-sexed lust. Or else the “sexual orientation” of the boys would be called into question (though in the case of the girls in this movie, that would be impossible).

Why are there no stories about male friendship? Can boys not be close friends anymore without inviting questions about their motives or descending into crass humor? There two genres that have this kind of male friendship (that I can think of) are war movies and westerns¹ . The problem is that boys have no movies to model good friendship, and rarely look for it in other media. But even other forms of media could be suspect. One could look back at older literature, but unfortunately, even a good friendship there might invite some speculation. Consider even the biblical story of David and Jonathan. There is no indication of any kind of sexual relationship there – indeed, each of them was married to at least one woman – but some contemporary “academics” want to read some kind of illicit connection there.

So I wish that someone could make a movie portraying a close bond between teenage boys similar to the one in Sisterhood. Though the girls’ movie could be better, at least there is something there. If anyone knows of a comparable boys’ movie, I’d love to hear about it, but I suspect that there aren’t many, if any, recent choices.

1. Older westerns. Brokeback Mountain is a famous recent example that suggests even this genre might be up for grabs. back↩