LOL (2012)

LOL arrives in 2012 as a remake of a 2008 French film of the same name, both directed by Lisa Azuelos, who evidently found her own material worth a second pass. Miley Cyrus plays Lola, a Chicago teenager of ordinary appetites, and Demi Moore plays her mother, a divorcée who reads a diary she should not have read and learns that her daughter has a life. The plot assembles the standard furniture of the genre: a cheating boyfriend, a battle of the bands, a misunderstanding in a bathroom stall, a class trip to Paris where a virginity is surrendered with the tact of a plot point. It is shapeless, as Variety noted at the time, and charming in the way a suburban mall is charming, which is to say not at all, but agreeably enough.

On the ledger of social consciousness, the film is nearly bare. The cast is white by default, and nothing in the screenplay treats that as a subject worth raising. Race goes unmentioned. No queer characters appear. No climate anxiety, no critique of wealth, no meditation on bodies or on minds that work differently. What the film does possess is a structural interest in women: a woman wrote it, a woman directed it, and the central relationship is between a mother and a daughter, each granted her own frustrations and her own romantic entanglements. That is genuine, if modest, attention, and it earns a small credit in the feminist column. It stops there. Nobody in this movie is making an argument.

The release itself reads like a studio performing arithmetic against its own wishes: 105 theaters, seven cities, limited promotion, and an opening weekend that returned roughly the price of a mid-sized sedan. There is no sermon here, no finger raised, no lesson delivered to a chastened audience. For a film about a generation supposedly drowning in screens and slanguage, it is remarkably incurious about what that generation might think or want. We are left with a document of teenhood assembled from parts that were already four years past freshness when filming began. The audit closes at very nearly nothing, and for a film of this kind that is not a failure of nerve. It is simply a film with nothing on its mind.