Sweeping this year’s AACTA (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts) Awards with 9 wins (including the big 5 and all four acting caterogies) of a total 13 nominations, Shannon Murphy’s debut feature BABY TEETH is a typical terminal illness melodrama, teenager Milla (Scanlen) is a typical only-child of a middle class family, her father Henry (Mendelsohn) is a psychiatrist and mother Anna (Davis) a musician. Smite with an unspecified terminal disease, in her last days, Milla falls in love with a 23-year-old pusher Moses (Wallace).
A priori, the synopsis sounds saccharine, a shining but evanescent love story conquering the class divide and prejudice, but in praxis, Murphy is sober and astute enough to circumvent some tired conventions, and let rip with raw emotions with both barrels. We are mercifully shunned from any scenes related to hospitals or doctors, the film's cynosure is relentlessly leveled at the four main characters (ironically, they are bound together by the ubiquitous drug culture across the board), especially, the puppy love between Milla and Moses.
We are prone to enunciate with a derogative tone of the word “puppy love”, that shallow, besotted foolishness irrationally residing in impressionable pubescence, sneered in hindsight by adults with a water-under-the-bridge haughtiness. But for Milla, that is all she has in the brevity of her life, there is no maturer, more sophisticated romance is set in store for her, and the advent of Moses, a tender, smart boy underneath his rough edges, to her, like a last straw, to love a boy and feel loved in reciprocity.
While emotions are painfully raw, Murphy puts much effort to get lighthearted vibes vibrating as much as they are allowed (like the eclectic infusion of bouncy, contemporary tunes). Milla is in philosophical resignation with her fate, and Scanlen, in her first leading role, never debases Milla’s misery into something even remotely pity-inducing. Hiding physical affliction and mental despair beneath her lineaments, she even archly plays up Milla’s railroading her parents into allowing Moses to stay in the family (who has the heart to deny a dying daughter’s wishes?), meantime, her burning yearning to live her life to the fullest emerges like a tidal wave, abandoning herself to the disco light and dance floor, yet, in the epicenter, Milla is becalmed, she has reconciled herself with the world, her only wish is that her beloved ones can find solace and courage to carry on without her.
As Moses, Wallace is a revelation, his outward tattooed aggressiveness is a hardened hull to the unfriendly world at large, debatably, Moses’ interiority is much more complex than anyone else, his affection towards Milla is not immediate infatuation, but a gradual crystallization, and as a tearaway rejected by his family, his hankering for a normal family is stated solely by Wallace’s tiny gestures, as if any visible symptom would instantly dash his hopes. When he finally find a telling communion with Milla, in that distressingly intimate scene of assisted suicide, Wallace inhabits Moses’ dithering head space with such remarkable exactitude that any modulation runs the risk of making the scenes either too schmaltzy or contrived.
Two phenomenal supporting turns from Mendelsohn and Davis are also worth our ovation, both process their characters’ imminent filial bereavement pursuant to their own constraints, Henry is emotionally benumbed while Anna is guilt-driven and verges on hysterical. Both thespians elevate their characters above those constraints, Davis for her unbowed ebullition and Mendelsohn has a killer tête-à-tête with Scanlen in the epilogue that culminates the film in a simultaneously heart-rending and life-affirming bang, one must watch it with their own eyes to get that visceral impact! Kudos is in order for Murphy and her copacetic crew.
referential entries: Jennifer Kent’s NIGHTINGALE (2018, 8.3/10); Jonathan Levine’s 50/50 (2011, 7.5/10).
