Short Term 12 - review

There's a too-cute-to-be-true ending to this US indie movie by the much-acclaimed young director Destin Cretton; I couldn't buy it, and found myself wondering if I had kept the receipt for the rest of the film too. Short Term 12 comes to the UK garlanded with strong reviews and two awards from the SXSW Festival; it is sincerely meant and fervently acted and directed. The setting is a foster-care halfway house for a dozen troubled teenagers; Brie Larson plays Grace, the kids' twentysomething caretaker —caring, compassionate, but no pushover. Her co-worker is Mason (John Gallagher Jr) whom she is also dating, an open secret at the facility. But then a new teenager arrives to stay, Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), and her problems trigger long-suppressed anxieties in Grace herself. The movie's sincerity is inscribed in every frame, but there are a few mental-ward cliché characters here, perhaps especially Jayden herself, the obvious rebellious badass (with the regulation earphones and diary/journal/notebook encrusted with punky graffiti) who is begging to be reached out to, and got through to. It isn't very far from James Mangold's 1999 film Girl, Interrupted with Dever in the Angelina Jolie role and Larson as Winona Ryder, the "good" girl who will have her own problems sacrificially cured. Well intentioned, but somehow inauthentic.