Review: The Idiosyncratic ‘Babyteeth’ Looks at Life Through Vivid Experience
“When I met you, it’s like you weren’t scared of anything.”
At the age of sixteen, Milla (Eliza Scanlen) still has one remaining baby tooth. A defining oddity of her character, it serves as a remnant of childhood yet to be shed. At such a young age, she hasn’t experience much that life has to offer. Venturing out on your own, making autonomous decisions, falling in love. Things she has yet to experience, but hopes to one day. The regiments of teen life are restrictive, and it’s only exacerbated by her remission with cancer, making fulfillments promised with age all the more pressing to attain.
Nay five minutes go by in Babyteeth before Milla starts pursuing those experiences. An awkward encounter on her way to school results in a newfound love for Moses (Toby Wallace), a twenty-three year-old drug dealer with face tattoos, rat-tail hair, and erratic behaviors. Her parents, Henry and Anna (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis) who they themselves are going through choppy waters with their marriage, emphatically disapprove of the relationship but reluctantly permit it in the wake of Milla’s diagnosis. What ensues is an assessment of experiential living in the face of death, asking the time old question: “What does it means to live while we’re still above the ground?”
Placing Milla at the center of the story, much of the film’s intrigue can be found by assessing individuals in relation to her and the circumstances of cancer. It’s alluded that Milla’s behavior is new. Her parents are shocked that their daughter, who grew up in a wealthy upbringing, attended private school, and excelled at playing the violin, would bring someone like Moses home. But what might be labeled as a phase for any other teen is seen under a different light given Milla’s circumstances. This is her first love, a love she anticipates to be her only one, and even though Moses’ behavior is unpredictably crass, even harmful, he gives Milla a sense of life in her shitty situation, a sentiment that is reciprocated by Moses and his unwelcome home life and developing drug addiction.
On the parental side, a family drama develops early on as Henry and Anna slip away from one another. The two remain together based on their mutual love for their daughter, but it’s far from a stable relationship that’s brought further to brink with Milla’s diagnosis. Words of conjugal support fall on deaf ears for Henry as he becomes negligent to his wife and develops fantasies of infidelity. Anna pleads for something to hold onto as her husband dismisses her in the wake of her own mental health problems. Their martial affairs are pushed to the extreme when presented with child loss, but observing Milla’s youthful resilience does them some good that might just save their future.
Under director Shannon Murphy, Babyteeth adorns a litany of idiosyncratic traits that delineate from your classic YA cancer love story. Breaks between scenes are given names akin to chapter titles. Interactions take on an unpredictable, in-the-moment feel. Dialog plays to both the quirky and grim. And both Scanlen and Wallace are giving performances that are jubilantly strange, far removed from classic romances of the genre, that is if you can label the film with one. Murphy’s work, in tandem with Rita Kalnejais’ script, should be credited for dodging cliche indie quirkiness in favor for challenging auteurist sensibilities that give the film an undeniable richness.
Of most concern is the relationship that forms between Milla and Moses which is frequently contentious. While Milla is head over heals in love with Moses, he is played as a floating grifter who frequently takes advantage of her, stealing her medication to sell and abandoning her at the worst times. He does have his undeniable charms, as seen by moments of utter sincerity, but it’s hard to fully understand the attraction to this relationship when Moses inflicts pain time and again only to be forgiven and then recede into the same behavior. Perhaps a byproduct of his own personal issues, but the oddities of this relationship can often feel wrong, a drag when such a romance is so central.
A precursor for Milla’s development is her aforementioned baby tooth. When it finally dislodges itself, there is a sense that Milla has reached a maturity, a maturity that comes with feeling love, experiencing pain, and knowing what it means to truly live. Her diagnosis threatens her future, and by extension, her ability to know these feelings later in life, but within her control, within her own will to live, she finds them.
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