Once in a while, a moviemaker will find it in her heart to make my dreams come true. In Drew Barrymore’s “Whip It,’’ when Juliette Lewis starts a food fight with Ellen Page that turns into about a dozen giggling women rolling around on the floor of a diner covered in condiments, grease, and cream, the movie had won my heart. Did I know this was something I wanted to see? Not really. But the great bait-and-switch of the movies amounts to your dreams being replaced with a director’s. And who would have thought that director would be a woman who, in her next life, seems destined to come back as an energy drink?
Whip It
The wheel deal: Barrymore, Page score in comedy
Barrymore has so thoroughly laced “Whip It’’ with her own lunatic affections for women and the human race in general that it ought to be sold as an antidepressant. For her first film as a director she’s opted not to raid her past for a juicy Hollywood melodrama. She’s given us a roller derby comedy, adapted with intelligence, heart, fairness, and some wit by Shauna Cross from her novel “Derby Girl.’’ Page plays Bliss Cavendar, a tomboy dying to get out of a small Texas town whose obsessions - football, beauty pageants, big hair - don’t interest her. (Barrymore actually shot the film in Michigan.)
As it happens, her mother, Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden), has been grooming Bliss and her younger sister for the pageant world. You know this woman is deluding herself to think she could relive her beauty-queen days through a daughter who shows up for one contest with some of her hair dyed blue.
Page’s eye-rolling and sulking are straight out of “Juno.’’ But this part is something new for her. One afternoon Brooke takes Bliss to a thrift store in nearby Austin to buy a pair of combat boots, when three full-figured women come skating toward the register like tattooed angels from hipster heaven. Page’s face lights up in a way I’ve never seen. The angels leave behind flyers for a roller derby league, and without a lot of effort Barrymore and Page make you feel the earth move beneath this girl’s feet.
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