My Girl (1991)

There is a certain kind of 1991 studio product that arrives wrapped in nostalgia and smelling faintly of formaldehyde, and My Girl is that product. Vada Sultenfuss, eleven years old, lives above her father's funeral parlor in a small Pennsylvania town in the summer of 1972. She is obsessed with death, convinced she is dying, and in love with her poetry teacher. Her best friend Thomas J. is allergic to the entire natural world. The film treats all of this with a soft-focus tenderness that critics of the day found either touching or cloying, depending on their tolerance for a child laid out in an open coffin.

The film does center a girl's inner life with an unusual frankness for its era. Menstruation arrives on screen without a euphemism, and Vada's terror at her own body is handled with a directness most family films of the period would have avoided entirely. That is a genuine small step. It is also in service of a sentimental coming-of-age arc, not a thesis about women's place in the world. The camera stays on Vada because she is the protagonist, not because anyone is mounting an argument.

Where the film reaches for something larger, it reaches for the therapist's couch. Grief is processed, named, and resolved. A father is scolded into feeling his daughter's pain. Critics at the time flagged the whole enterprise as pop-psych banality dressed in period detail, and they were right, though the film is gentle enough that the sermon never raises its voice. The wider social fabric is simply absent. Race, class, the environment, the politics of 1972: none of it registers. The town is white, comfortable, and untouched by history. What remains is a modest weepie with good performances and a manipulative final act. It wants us to cry. It does not want us to think, which is at least honest.