My Girl 2 (1994)

My Girl 2 arrives three years after its predecessor, trading the mortuary humor of 1971 for a gentler spring break in 1974. Vada Sultenfuss, now thirteen, is dispatched to Los Angeles to interview strangers about a mother she never knew, and the film treats this as an excuse for warm lighting, palm trees, and mild adolescent confusion. Howard Zieff directs with the soft hand of a man assembling a valentine. The result is amiable, low-stakes, and almost entirely uninterested in the social questions that would come to dominate the cinema of later decades. The cast is white and pleasant. A police officer, a photographer, and a poet drift through Vada's investigation without a single line devoted to their ancestry. That is not a failing. It is simply the film's temperature.

The film's moral instruction stays strictly personal. Vada learns that her mother smoked, married young, and divorced, and she survives the discovery. Her uncle Phil learns to commit. Nick learns to be generous with his spring break. The screenplay, rewritten by Carrie Fisher of all people, keeps its sermons small and domestic: be yourself, love your family, call your stepmother. No economic grievances are aired. No environmental anxieties intrude. No critique of the institutions surrounding these children ever surfaces. Bodies are discussed only when a funeral director needs to embalm one.

What remains is a competent piece of adolescent sentimentality that the critical establishment received with a shrug. Ebert suggested Vada was becoming a necrophile. The box office was respectable but unremarkable. As a cultural artifact, the film sits at zero on nearly every axis a modern classifier would care to measure, and it earns its single flicker of sermonizing honestly: a gentle, unearned insistence that being yourself will suffice. For a sequel about a girl researching a dead mother, it is remarkably untroubled. There is nothing here to offend anyone, which is itself a kind of achievement. The sommelier sets down the glass and reaches for the next bottle, faintly relieved and faintly bored in equal measure.

A note for the file: this is a sequel, and nothing more exotic than that. No Oscar graced it, no comic book spawned it, no true story inspired it, and it never reached the top of the domestic chart. It simply exists, politely, in the shadow of a film that had the decency to kill a child with bees.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}