Aquamarine (2006)

The 2006 tween fantasy Aquamarine arrives with the particular pedigree of a studio picture that knows exactly whom it serves and asks little of anyone else. Elizabeth Allen directs, in her feature debut, a loose adaptation of Alice Hoffman's young adult novel about a mermaid washed ashore in a Florida beach town and the two thirteen-year-old girls who hide her. The camera stays low and warm. The performances are loose. The whole thing smells faintly of sunscreen and magazine quizzes, which is the point.

On the matter of representation, the film offers a female director and a pair of girls at its center, which in 2006 counted for something, but the cast is otherwise a wall of whiteness and the town a study in beige. The romance is strictly boy-meets-mermaid. No queer current runs beneath these waves, whatever a later pop star may have read into them. The friendship between Claire and Hailey carries real emotional weight, and the film treats their loyalty with a respect that most teen comedies reserve for kisses. Yet the plot still turns on a lifeguard's attention, and the girls spend their summer consulting CosmoGirl for tricks to win him.

The lessons arrive quietly. Friendship over popularity, altruism over trend-chasing, and a closing note that the audience is fine as it is. That last sentiment is general enough to avoid any specific claim about bodies or minds. Aquamarine's bafflement at human customs is the bafflement of a fish out of water, not a diagnosis. There is no economic grievance here, no climate sermon, no revision of the historical record, and the ocean remains a backdrop instead of a cause. We are left with a small, sincere thing that has somehow become a cult object for a generation that found it later, and there are worse fates for a movie about a girl with a tail.