Starring
Michelle Trachtenberg, Kim Cattral. Written by Hadley Davis. Directed
by Tim Fywell. (G) 98 min. Opens Mar 18.
Self-professed
“science geek” Casey Howard (Michelle Trachtenberg) is a
girl with a tough choice to make. She can pick up a thankless job at
the arena snack bar, invest her meagre earnings in the services of a
cold, corrupt skating coach (Kim Cattrall), undertake a Herculean
training regimen and learn to navigate the catty, cutthroat world of
amateur figure skating. Or she can throw it all away and take the
physics scholarship to Harvard.
While Trachtenberg has
little experience in skating beyond her frozen pond, a high school
physics project and a beginner class with some fiercely precocious
6-year-olds make her believe that she can blaze a bright career for
herself in figure skating. With the help of a laptop computer and
some physics formulae, she makes dramatic strides, learning in 6
months to skate better than the girls who’ve dedicated
themselves to the sport their entire lives. Go science!
Casey’s
Grape-Nut-munching feminist mom (Joan Cusack) ends up being the
insensitive bad guy for pressuring her daughter to pursue Harvard. In
a delicately nuanced Disney twist, the other girls, whose parents
have given up everything for skating, actually pine for Casey’s
old carefree life, where they can spend more time with their
boyfriends and eat a hamburger once in a while.
The
message to the 12-year-old girls who will assuredly drive box office
receipts for this film is this: parents just don’t understand —
and if you follow your heart, you’ll always come out on top.
And if we’d never heard the underdog tales of
Rocky,
Seabiscuit,
Hickory High, or
The Bad News Bears,
that might be inspiring news to us, too.