Delayed Reaction: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Premise: Four friends scatter across the globe over the summer for assorted romance and coming-of-age stories.

 

In The Social Network, there’s a fun recurring bit where they remind you that it started as “The Facebook”. Mark Zuckerberg continually insists on keeping the “The” in there. That was the name of the site he created, after all. It’s a losing battle though. The “The” isn’t needed. It eventually is dropped because they realize it isn’t needed. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants reminded me of this. Perhaps this is sacrilege to say but that movie really didn’t need the pants. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I thought the pants would be way more central to this movie. Instead, I sort of lost track of who even had the pants at any point and got annoyed when they would insist that they were key to anything.

 

I get it though. This is based on a book series with the same name. The title is attention-grabbing even if it is nonsense. It wouldn’t make sense to drop the pants. It just felt really unnecessary though. The jump from “Weird. These jeans fit and look good on all of us” to “These are magic jeans that will bring us all good luck. Let’s draw up a manifesto” is very forced. It had the feeling of something that was only there because it happened in the book, except the book was able to spend way more time foregrounding it.

 

Beyond that hyper-specific issue, I enjoyed this. That’s entirely due to the cast, which is a sort of 2005 All-Stars lineup. At that point we were several years into seeing if Alexis Bledel was a star. Amber Tamblyn already had an Emmy nomination for Joan of Arcadia. America Ferrera was riding the success of her film debut, Real Women Have Curves, a few years before. The only actual gamble in the cast was Blake Lively. All of the cast have stayed active over the years. Normally, you expect to have at least one person in a young cast like this who retired (by choice or by lack of options), but not this cast. Lively quickly followed this with a hot CW show followed by a level of fame that arguably exceeds any of her film roles. Ferrera has become one of the more reliable TV stars of the last 17 years. Bledel and Tamblyn have worked very steadily too. Bledel even has an Emmy and has seen Gilmore Girls evolve into the TV cannon. In short, this movie benefits greatly from its stars remaining collectively more relevant than, say, Aquamarine or Sleepover (although there are some individual casting gems in those).

 

The four stories strike a good balance. There’s a death story, a divorce story, and two love stories. All of them have secondary focuses too to prevent them from getting repetitive. It’s a PG movie aimed at tweens, so I’ll forgive them for not going super deep into anything. For what it is, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants is pretty good. That said, it isn’t something targeted to me, and I felt that.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend