Review: Babyteeth

In the last few years there’s been a strange rise in Teenage Cancer Romances, films like Fault In Our Stars or Me & Earl & The Dying Girl which focus on young adult love stories where one or more characters have cancer. The cynic in me thinks it’s all a cheap ploy to have a sad ending and emotionally manipulate people but in the case of Babyteeth, they make the important distinction that being a cancer teen in love doesn’t distract from the fact that you’re still just a teenager and you’re not up for making the best choices.

The film follows Milla, a 16 year old schoolgirl who’s been diagnosed with cancer, who has a chance run-in with Moses, a 23 year old drug dealer and is immediately smitten with him. Milla’s parents Henry, a psychiatrist, and Anna, a musician, aren’t thrilled due to the age difference and Moses’ drug habits, especially once they find him trying to steal some of Henry’s prescription drugs, but they relent once they see how enamoured Milla is with him and their desire to see her final days be happy ones.

What follows is a confusing, awkward time for the family as the stress of Milla’s cancer and her own coming-of-age drama come to a head, fuelled by a difficult romance between Milla and Moses that ebbs and flows through tender moments and awful let-downs as well as family issues stemming from anxiety, pain and never really knowing what the right course of action is.

I won’t lie, for about half the film I wasn’t totally on-board, the general premise was fine, teenager in love makes a bad choice in who she loves, but the film kept portraying Moses as this deadbeat junkie loser who was consistently letting Milla down but her parents kept letting her see him and giving the relationship scenes of seemingly genuine affection and I didn’t understand it. Why was the film being so back-and-forth about what was clearly an unstable love story.

But as the film went on I saw the bigger picture, nobody in this film is making good choices, there’s an ugly reality to the whole thing that permeates throughout and honestly makes for a much more intriguing watch. Having a teenage daughter with cancer is a fucked up situation to be in and being a teenage daughter with cancer even more so, but the film uses that not to justify the choices the characters make but to explain them. We’re essentially seeing the happiest and most heart-wrenching time of this families life playing out together, it’s an angle to the Teenage Cancer Romance genre that I found honest and refreshing, teenager make bad choices in life but so does everyone and just because they’re bad doesn’t mean they’ll ruin everything.

Character work definitely helped the film with the main four carrying the balancing act of making the film rough but believable. Eliza Scanlen plays Milla and gives her the right amount of tenacity and immaturity to make her work as a lead character, we don’t know how long she’s been living with cancer but it’s clearly been long enough for her to come to terms with it, in fact her having cancer is rarely brought up except in the case of Milla dying young which is a possibility that everyone has to face. By diverting focus away from the disease the film instead places its eye on the romance angle which Scanlen plays into very well, this being Milla’s first love she treats it like any teenager would and puts way too much time and effort into it, even when Moses lets her down she still wants to go back to him. But you never blame Milla for that, Scanlen doesn’t make Milla out to be naive but rather hopeful, she wants this relationship to work because it might be the only relationship she ever has, given her situation she’s clearly older than her years but at the same time she is still a fucking teenager with little world knowledge and finding the middle ground would be tricky but Scanlen captures it almost effortlessly and boosts the film as a result.

Likewise Toby Wallace as Moses could’ve easily just been a lowdown junkie bastard who only used Milla to get to her father’s priscription drugs and at times he is just that, but there are moments where he seems to have genuine care for Milla, maybe love or at least close enough to love to matter. It’s implied that Moses has a rough home life, whether that’s a cause for his drug use or if his addiction is the cause for his home life is unclear but it’s certain that he’s not had the typical family upbringing so when he does start this relationship with Milla he’s not sure how to approach it, especially once he starts getting invested in her life which does genuinely throw him for a loop. Like Scanlen, Wallace gives Moses a great balancing act, never making him so much of a junkie loser for us to totally be against him and Milla but never changing himself so much to feel like an entirely different person, he’s got his own issues to deal with and falling in love with a cancer teen wasn’t on the agenda but he’s in it now and through the film his attempts to come to terms with that are as important to the story as anything else.

Milla’s parents Henry and Anna are played by Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis respectively, I still get uneasy around Mendelsohn thanks to his role of playing the bad guy in basically everything he does now but Henry is played with a warm yet flawed personality. He clearly cares about MIlla and at times feels like the one most at ease with knowing that she will pass but the fact is he’s still going to lose his daughter one day and putting her at ease often clashing with his duties as a parent. It’s not that he dislikes Moses, in fact he’s more open towards him than Anna is, but he can see the cracks in the relationship and wants to make sure that Milla doesn’t, whether it’s done out of genuine care or if he sees it as a small evil for the greater good of Milla’s wellbeing isn’t explained but either one would fit this soft-hearted character.

Davis as Anna is a little more sharp-tongued, she doesn’t want Milla having anything to do with Moses and makes that vocally clear but even she recognises the joy he brings her. Anna is put in the same difficult position as Henry in that she cares and loves Milla but knowing what’s good for her is at odds with making her happy, something all parents have to contend with but even more so with a cancer child, however Anna’s relationship with Milla is more strained due to Anna’s own problems with legal drug use to tackle her anxiety and sleeping problems meaning Milla feels she barely knows who her real mother is. Like Milla’s cancer, Anna’s anxiety is never focussed on but knowing that about her character informs a lot of how she acts and Davis plays into that, making Anna a little too pushy but never going so far as to be overbearing, there’s parts to her that showcase a mother trying desperately to hold onto her daughter’s life and given the circumstances you can understand why and why Milla wants to break free from her at the same time.

The film is the feature debut of Shannon Murphy who makes quite strong first outing, it’s fairly small in terms of filmmaking but how she handles the subject matter is impressive. For starters, as much as the film is about cancer, I don’t think The C Word is every used – which for an Australian film is surprising – but that goes into what I was saying about cancer not being the focal point, Milla’s diagnosis informs where she is as a character and why her parents act the way they do but it’s never the driving force of the film. Which is not to say it’s ignored, we get scenes of Milla having bad days among her good ones, we get one hard to watch moment where a classmate asks to wear Milla’s wig with no regard for how self-conscious being bald in front of another person would be for her and the threat of the disease of ever looming through the whole film but I never felt like the film was about the cancer and I appreciated it for that.

Instead by turning the focus towards this awkward love story between Milla and Moses, Murphy has allowed herself the chance to inject some much needed reality into the cancer romance genre, making everything feels just that little bit more raw and socially grey, be it drug addiction, infidelity or just being too scared to do the right thing because the right thing is terrifying. This is backed up by how Murphy uses the camera, often going hand-held to get right into the heart of this mess, and it is a mess at times, nothing about this life is glamorous, the whole thing feels lacking in any of that Hollywood cancer crap, there’s no heart-to-heart as Milla lays dying in bed, there’s no big reconciliation, it’s all just sudden and painful and those few fleeting moments of happiness are what push everyone along waiting for the inevitable. Even the ending feels like a footnote because of how low-key it plays itself out. Murphy chose a heavy subject matter for her first film but her talents here show that she can and does pull it off quite nicely.

I was recommended Babyteeth a few months ago by a friend having never heard of it beforehand, since then I’ve seen it pop up here and there but never given a great deal of attention which is a shame because I think it’s quite good. The Teenage Cancer Romance angle might put some people off but it’s a lot messier than that, it uses cancer as a jumping off point for examining flawed people in a difficult situation whilst using the cover of a love story. It’s not always an easy watch but thanks to the combined talents of the four leads for balancing the best and worst elements of their characters and newcomer Murphy for injecting the realism needed for making this type of film, it’s certainly worth a watch at least.

7.5/10