Material Girls (2006)
Directed by Martha Coolidge
Written by Jessica O'Toole, Amy Rardin
Starring Hilary Duff, Haylie Duff, Anjelica Huston, Lukas Haas, Brent Spiner, Maria Conchita Alonso
Release Date August 18th, 2006
Published August 20th, 2006
Trashing a movie like Material Girls is like shooting fish in a barrel. You could rip this movie just from having seen the press materials. So how does a critic approach a movie like this? My tactic is to try and be understanding of the niche audience the film is meant to entertain. In the case of Material Girls, the audience is 12 year old girls. So, what do 12 year old girls have in store for them in Material Girls? Nothing they haven't seen before. Vapid, shallow starlets in haute couture learning shallow lessons about love and family and how to be yourself.
Is the movie funny? Not to me. But, will the target audience laugh?
The Marchetta sisters Ava (Haylie Duff) the oldest, and younger sister Tanzy (Hilary Duff) are privileged Hollywood socialites living in the lap of luxury thanks to the fortune provided by their late father's cosmetics company. They are the face of the company, modeling the products on billboards across the globe affording them a lavish lifestyle of parties and rich friends.
Secretly however Tanzy harbors the ambition to go college and become a chemist while Ava looks to become the wife of a famous TV star. Things go bad for the Marchetta's when a shady reporter breaks a story that Marchetta cosmetics are causing consumers to get nasty rashes. This just as a ruthless rival, Fabiella (Angelica Huston), makes an offer to buy the company, something the girls top advisor and their father's former best friend Tommy (Brent Spiner) suggests they do.
The girls are more stubborn than expected, they plan to fight for their father's company. Unfortunately the scandal bankrupts them, a fire takes their fabulous mansion and Ava's TV star fiance dumps her. This jovian series of events leaves the girls living in the ghetto with their loving maid Inez (Maria Conchita Alonzo) and seeking the help of the common people they had so long looked down their noses at.
The characters may evoke comparisons to the famous Hilton sisters or even Mary Kate and Ashley Olson, but Material Girls is no satirical gloss on excess in celeb-land. Rather, this is yet another simpleminded exercise in teen girl empowerment. The message of Material Girls is to be false and bad things will happen, be true to yourself and good things will happen. There are post cards with as much wisdom that cost a lot less than the price of a ticket to see this film.
A pair of pencil thin Hollywood sisters telling America's teens that being yourself is the true path to happiness has a falseness to it that is far too obvious to bother pointing out. But trashing a movie like Material Girls for being shallow is like criticizing the clouds for the rain. This movie was shallow from the moment it was conceived to the day director Martha Coolidge completed principle photography.
For her part Martha Coolidge does little to distinguish herself as a director. Material Girls is not a movie that will stand out on a resume, even one whose biggest highlight is the TV movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, a slight but compelling memoir. It's not that Coolidge is unskilled but her talents are put to task in Material Girls creating something so superficial and so mindless that whatever skills she has feel like wasted effort.
The Duff sisters are a pair of attractive young women who at the very least can rely on their looks to draw a crowd. It's a shame that the only pleasure derived from Material Girls comes from objectifying the two lovely young stars but you have to take what you can get when it comes to something as insipid and banal as Material Girls.
Among other very minor pleasures to be found in Material Girls it's nice to see Lukas Haas get some mainstream Hollywood work. His role as a legal aid lawyer and love interest for Haylie Duff is nothing to get excited about but I have always liked Haas, all the way back to his breakout performance as the mute child of Witness.
Shallow, mindless, a waste of film. All valid criticisms of Material Girls. All judgements I could have made without having seen the film. I did see the film. The key assessment is that this movie was not made with 30 year old film critics in mind. This is a movie made for the attention spans of the modern 12 year old girl. Whether or not they like the film I have no idea. I know that if I had a 12 year old daughter I would not want to expose her to such a vapid waste of 90 minutes.
