The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)

Four teenage girls from Bethesda buy a pair of secondhand jeans that fit all of them, which is either a miracle or a laundering error, and mail the garment around the world for a summer. That is the entire engine of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a 2005 adaptation of Ann Brashares' young adult novel, and it runs on a sincerity that borders on the liturgical. The pants function as plot device, talisman, and a modest statement about bodies: four figures of different shapes are assured they look fabulous in the same denim. Body acceptance registers, faintly. Activism does not.

The film's most substantive cultural work happens in Carmen's storyline. America Ferrera's character, Puerto Rican and Catholic, arrives in South Carolina to find her white father about to marry a WASP widow with two teenagers. The stepfamily dismisses her Spanish, rejects her recipes, and lets a saleswoman call her "the other one" at a dress fitting. These are explicit, well-observed beats about ethnic exclusion, and they land harder than anything else in the picture. The casting of Ferrera and Alexis Bledel gives the ensemble some texture, though the surrounding quartet stays largely white and the film never presents itself as a diversity project.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. There is no queer content, no climate anxiety, no class warfare, no neurodivergent arc, and no attempt to rewrite history. The feminism on offer is the soft kind: four girls who love each other and muddle toward adulthood. Bridget's summer at soccer camp complicates the goodwill, since she pursues an adult coach and loses her virginity to him, a storyline the film treats as formative experience instead of what it actually is. The lessons arrive earnestly, about fathers and grief and friendship, but they are personal lessons, not a sermon about the culture. A genial, well-acted artifact of its moment. It asks nothing of the audience but a tissue.