DVD Review: Whip It

As someone who closely follows Austin film news, it's impossible for me to talk about Whip It -- or to watch it -- without facing the issues of its setting and production. The rollerderby movie was written by a former Austinite, is set in Austin and a nearby small town, makes Austin practically a character ... and apart from a few days of shooting scenes of notable locations here, was shot in Michigan. Should we count it as an Austin film? Does it matter, especially for non-locals?

Regardless of where it was filmed, Whip It -- now available on DVD and Blu-Ray -- is a charming film, aimed at a teenage crowd but enjoyable by grownups as well. I don't need to tell you how refreshing it is to watch a movie written and directed by women, in which the girls and women are all fairly strong and well-rounded characters who do much more than dream about or follow the menfolk.

Bliss (Ellen Page) is a high-school girl in small-town Central Texas. Her mom (Marcia Gay Harden) has pushed Bliss and her younger sister into the regional beauty pageant circuit, insisting that it will help them later in life. Bliss is also working part-time with her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) at a local diner with a giant pig on it. While in Austin shopping for clothes, Bliss finds out about rollerderby and is fascinated. She decides to sneak off to join a banked-track rollergirl team, the Hurl Scouts, lying about her age. A whole new world opens as she becomes Babe Ruthless.

While Page is fun to watch, and has much less annoying dialogue than in Juno, the team of supporting actors are the best thing about the movie. Drew Barrymore, in her feature directorial debut, has assembled a lot of great talent. Daniel Stern has a small but sweet role as Bliss's dad, Andrew Wilson is as good as I've ever seen him as the coach of the Hurl Scouts, and even Jimmy Fallon, as the rollerderby emcee, has found just the right role for himself. Juliette Lewis and her character both seem a little inconsistent, and Barrymore's Smashley Simpson was a little too flaky for me.

But the two performances that make the film worth watching are from Kristen Wiig (at right in the above photo) and Marcia Gay Harden. Wiig adds depth to what could have been a small "rollergirls aren't all they appear" role. She was wonderful in three movies in 2009 -- Extract and Adventureland are the other two -- and I hope to see her in more films. Harden (a member of the Texas Film Hall of Fame) also performs miracles with what in other movies might be just another ambitious mom character. Harden makes you believe you are actually in small-town Texas, in a way that no amount of Alamo Drafthouse and Longhorn t-shirts and references to Austin can do.

Look past the performances and the cool rollerderby sequences, and you have a very straightforward, predictable film about a young woman gaining a better sense of self through a new activity -- like many sports movies and dance movies of the past decade. Whip It adds a strong message of feminism -- you can be smart and sexy and also kick ass on the rollerderby rink -- and I especially like the way that Bliss ultimately handles the situation with her first serious boyfriend, played by musician Landon Pigg.

However, Whip It doesn't seem to know what its audience is, which presents problems for a number of viewers. Although this is a movie for teenagers, parts of it are inappropriate for younger girls, and that's a shame for a movie about cool chick empowerment. The movie is rated PG-13, mainly I assume for a non-graphic sex scene and some sex talk. I realize I probably sound like my mom, but I kind of wish the movie had toned down the sex content and scored a PG rating, then unabashedly marketed itself to a slightly younger crowd. I'd like my 9-year-old niece to see it; I think she'd love it.

Extras: The extras on this DVD are minimal -- deleted scenes only. No commentary track, no cute featurettes. Fox Searchlight produced a featurette that was released before Whip It hit theaters, but it's not on the DVD. The deleted scenes include an alternate opening scene that I liked because it explained Bliss's hair dye better, and one or two other funny scenes (I'm hoping to work the term "petulant hindquarters" into conversation), but are generally unremarkable. The policeman who chides Bliss at the end of the "No Tip" scene is J. Todd Anderson, a storyboard artist whose finest hour onscreen may have been as Bachelor #3 (competing with Matt Damon and Brad Pitt) in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

The Blu-Ray also has an interview with screenwriter Shauna Cross, which I haven't yet seen.

Austin Connections: Marcia Gay Harden is a UT Austin grad. The rollerderby sections of the film are set in Austin, but were not shot here. However, a small amount of location shooting gives us glimpses of downtown Austin, including Alamo Ritz. Screenwriter Shauna Cross is a rollerderby veteran from Austin and based her book (Derby Girl) and screenplay on the Austin rollergirl scene. (For a more accurate but less breezy history of local rollerderby, I recommend Bob Ray's documentary Hell on Wheels.)

I think Whip It would have been improved by filming in actual Austin and Central Texas -- imagine what a few recognizable local musicians would have done to the party scenes, not to mention actual Austin rollergirls. At times, I felt like the dialogue included blatant, almost excessive references to Austin to try to convince us that we're there. But I'm told that non-Austinites were successfully fooled by the Michigan setting, so perhaps I'm just being picky.

Check out Whip It for yourself and let me know what you think: the movie is available in local stores as well as on Amazon in DVD and Blu-Ray formats.