Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back in Utah covering the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the premieres are already flowing. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they are published, and check out our full archives of past editions.
It’s amusing that, in an era in which conversations over “banned” books are returning to the forefront of the popular consciousness, we are essentially still litigating the same books we were the last time around. Sure, there might be a Gender Queer here, or The Hate U Give there, but if you look into the lists, most of the names remain the same: Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, and the queen of the Challenged School Library Book, Judy Blume. Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s new documentary about the author, Judy Blume Forever, makes a case for inclusion in any canon of teen-lit or YA-adjacent authors as well as her continued relevance, and the film wholly succeeds thanks to Blume’s involvement, as she participated fully in the film’s production. And what a gift that must have been, to have one of the foundational figures of American Teenagerhood present and willing to dive deep into her process and her personal history with a genuine forthrightness, humor, and lack of caginess. Normally we have to wait until someone passes on for them to receive this proper evaluation. Still, we’re lucky enough that the culture caught up to Blume fast enough that these filmmakers were able to immortalize her, to put a face and accompanying vocal to a literary voice that many are very familiar with.
In practice, Judy Blume Forever is your cut-and-dried biographical documentary, with archival footage, talking heads, and plenty of attempts to place her work in some sort of historical and emotional context. What’s fascinating is how we learn what we learn, with Blume guiding us through her own history and informing us of the many shades of her character and life that we never quite got to see through the kaleidoscopic reflection of them in her fiction. Most of her oeuvre is discussed at some point, though there’s a particular focus on the hits: Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret and its boundary-busting perspective on pubescent adolescence; Fudge, and how Blume attempted to respect the boundaries between what she lifted from her life — specifically her son’s mannerisms and activities — and her respect for the person (in a candid moment, her son admits to being worried about Fudge impacting his dating prospects in High School); Deenie, whose controversy caused her to spar with Pat Buchanan over masturbation on an episode of Crossfire, and, of course, Forever…, which continues to introduce generations of young readers to the cringe-worthy tradition of naming one’s member.
But the most affecting material within the doc comes from Blume’s relationship with her fans, many of whom she maintained decades-spanning correspondence, who consulted her as a far-away confidant, sharing details of their lives and asking for help. Hell, Blume even went to one of their college graduations, to say nothing of the help and advocacy that she gave a few who had troubles far more serious than one might think. Of course, Forever also deals with Blume’s anti-censorship advocacy, which imparts the doc with the standard “Why [Insert Topic Here] Now?” issue, but, again, with the added perspective of an old hand looking at familiar issues in new light.
What’s somewhat frustrating is how Pardo and Wolchok nearly squander their most valuable feature — Blume’s camera-ready and affable nature, full of wit and vigor and joie de vivre even at the age of 83 — and instead dilutes and bloats the film with a series of famous faces, whose presences are just distracting. It’s hard to make something like Elvis Presley: The Searcher, where the obviously-bountiful amount of archival footage of The King made it possible for the film to relegate its perspective-providing context-givers to an audio track, but one might imagine that Blume, who was never exactly camera-shy, might have had the same focus. Hearing the creator of Gossip Girl marvel over the fact that Blume wrote a sexy and funny novel for adults or Lena Dunham discuss her relationship with the subject’s work is not even nearly as important or worthwhile as hearing the artist herself discuss her relationship with her more anonymous fans or reflect on how a finally-stable marriage allowed her to grieve her father’s passing through her writing, almost decades after the fact.
Let’s be real: If there were an Elvis in the world of Young-Adult Fiction, it would likely be Judy Blume (I don’t know who exactly Rowling would be, but insert a less-flattering comparison here), whose works continue to top the best-sellers list in the genre year-after-year decades after they hit the shelves. Roughly 50,000,000 Judy Blume fans can’t be wrong, and more and more are being minted every day: This film’s target audience does not need to be convinced of her relevance because they already think so. It’s a bizarre tactic that doesn’t amount to any real payoff aside from, perhaps, allowing Judy Blume Forever to fit into your average bio-doc category comfortably, but it cannot extinguish her light as it flickers across the screen, full of wonder and care and empathy that radiated from her pages towards the attentive eyes of children all across the world.