The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003)

The Lizzie McGuire Movie, released in 2003, serves as the theatrical farewell to a Disney Channel series about a middle-school girl and the cartoon version of herself who lives inside her head. The premise sends Lizzie to Rome on a graduation trip, where a pop star named Paolo mistakes her for his estranged singing partner and recruits her to impersonate the woman at an awards ceremony. Mistaken identity, a foreign city, a boy with good cheekbones. The stakes are a stage and a boy's attention, which is to say the stakes are everything and nothing. The machinery of farce, assembled with professional cheer and no larger purpose in sight.

The cast is a nearly unbroken field of whiteness, an inheritance the film accepts without comment. A few Italian performers fill the local-color slots, and the screenplay asks nothing of them beyond an accent and a scooter. No casting ambition stirs here. The film assembles the people it has always assembled, and the camera regards them fondly. The director built an earlier career around gay material, yet no trace of it survives in this script. Rome remains a backdrop, and the backdrop keeps its secrets.

Lizzie does find her spine by the closing number, and she reconciles with Kate, the popular girl who once made her life miserable. This is a mild, familiar brand of tween empowerment, the sort that has powered after-school television for decades. It raises no questions about power and advances no argument. The picture preaches nothing. It indicts no industry, and the pop-star machinery gleams untouched when the credits roll. A weightless confection, and weightlessness, in this ledger, counts as its own kind of innocence. The film wants only to be liked, and on that modest errand it succeeds without ever troubling the culture around it.

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