Milla re-centers its gaze beautifully the movie seems to find its confidence and purpose at roughly the same time she does. When “Babyteeth” gazes away from her for too long - as when it tries to accommodate side characters like Milla’s expat music teacher (Eugene Gilfedder) or a neighbor (Emily Barclay) who strikes up a friendship with Henry - its focus tends to falter. Those afflictions may superficially unite them, but thanks to Scanlen’s mercurial screen presence, you are likely to come away marveling at their distinctions. You might have seen Scanlen recently in the HBO series “Sharp Objects” and in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” in which she played characters who also struggled with long-term illness. Which becomes, in turn, a way of seeing Milla herself more clearly. Moses is an overgrown lost boy, devoid of any ambitions beyond his next fix, and one of the movie’s best qualities is how - without softening his rough edges or pleading for our sympathy - it gets us to see what Milla sees in him. Their devotion to her is never in doubt, even when it’s tested by her wildly inappropriate taste in boyfriends. Her acts of rebellion - brazenly flirting with Moses, running away from home for a night on the town - exist alongside scenes of warm, wordless affection with her parents. She’s always a person and never a flow chart. Henry, a psychiatrist, retreats into his own distractions and avoids confrontation at every turn he attempts similar preemptive tactics with his wife, prescribing heavy medication to temper her bouts of depression and anxiety. Anna, once a promising musician, now spends most of her time agonizing over Milla. This proves especially crucial with Anna and Henry, whose anxiety over Milla’s health exposes and deepens the cracks in their marriage they have a lot of history, and a lot to judge. The movie fortunately escapes this trap, largely by allowing its characters to escape whatever convenient labels we might attach to them. (“American Beauty,” anyone?) but capable of flourishing anywhere in the world with drugs, psychobabble, backyard swimming pools, alluring neighbors and other distractions favored by the dysfunctional bourgeoisie. My own concern while watching “Babyteeth” was not that it might behave too much like a play but rather that it might fall into an overly familiar variant of suburban movie misery, well known in the U.S. Individual moments sometimes veer unsteadily between comedy and pathos, rather than achieving a seamless amalgam of both. The nearly two-hour film is somewhat archly divided into a series of vignettes, most of them bearing glib, sardonic chapter titles. With a restless camera that bobs and weaves from one scene to the next (the director of photography is Andrew Commis), she scrambles the narrative along with our expectations, seeking a formal syntax that will mirror Milla’s volatile state and that of her deeply shaken family. (The film was shot in Sydney.) But Murphy, making a strong feature debut (you can see her work on the third season of “Killing Eve”), grasps that the difference between the theatrical and the cinematic is blurrier than we might think, and that the brand of psychological drama she’s pursuing has rich antecedents in both traditions. Some of the material’s stage origins are evident in the screenplay’s barbed confrontations, its carefully modulated verbal tension and the confinement of much of the drama to the Finlays’ comfortable suburban home. That’s the general outline of the story, directed by Australian filmmaker Shannon Murphy and adapted by Rita Kalnejais from her own play. Her mother, Anna (Davis), and father, Henry (Mendelsohn), look on with a kind of dumbfounded helplessness: If this creep really is the fulfillment of their smart, sensitive daughter’s dying wish, who are they to argue? Moses has a rat-tail, strung-out eyes and a tattoo on his cheek that might as well read “bad news” Milla, instantly smitten, brings him home to dinner. He apologizes and tries to staunch her nosebleed, then asks if she has any money. Milla is waiting for a train, closing her eyes and perhaps contemplating a leap onto the tracks, when Moses (Wallace), a flailing raw nerve on long, skinny legs, sideswipes her on the platform. There is no fault in these terrific stars, or in Toby Wallace’s arresting performance as the 23-year-old drug addict who crashes into Milla’s life, upending moments that might be her last. Eliza Scanlen plays Milla Finlay, a 15-year-old who’s been diagnosed with cancer, and Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn are her parents, who respond to their daughter’s steady decline with varying degrees of panic, rage and resignation. “Babyteeth,” a drama of unruly intelligence and churning emotional force, brings a jolt of unpredictability to a type of movie usually known for its grim, maudlin excess: the coming-of-age, coming-of-death story.
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