---

There isn’t any revenge movie-style score-settling in Joan Micklin Silver’s Big Girls Don’t Cry…They Get Even (1991). The “getting even” just involves its angry heroine angling to get noticed by her neglectful, comically big family. That angry heroine is a tomboyish 13-year-old named Laura (a convincingly wise-beyond-her-years Hillary Wolf) who is, as the film opens, so frustrated with her dysfunctional clan that she’s begun fantasizing lately about running away. Her parents, David and Melinda (Griffin Dunne and Margaret Whitton), divorced a few years ago. Since then, David has collected a handful of ex-wives Laura calls “the lost bimbos.” (Though she admittedly likes the most recent ex, Barbara, played by Patricia Kalember, whom David has a 4-year-old with.) And after a whirlwind two-day marriage to a guy she barely knew, Melinda is now wed to aloof businessman Keith (David Strathairn). 

Now Laura lives in a big house with Melinda, Keith, two of his kids (Jenny Lewis and Trenton Teigen), and her boy-genius half-brother (Ben Savage). At home she feels like an afterthought: her mother seems to favor her comparably materialistic stepsister. And on the rare occasion she catches up with David, now living with a “friend,” Stephanie (Adrienne Shelly), who happens to be carrying his twins, Laura thinks she hears a hint of obligation edging her dad’s words. She’s got to escape. She feels she has a kindred spirit in Keith’s eldest — and estranged — son Josh (Dan Futterman), who, in addition to feeling like an outcast himself, resents Keith for the emotional distance that’s lasted ever since his mother’s death. 

A little into Big Girls Don’t Cry, Laura finally goes through with running away, exhilarated. She stows herself in the back of Josh’s truck and temporarily lives with him at the lakeside cabin where he’s been isolating himself lately. When the whole extended family arrives to pick her up, though (they’re about to go on a Hawaii trip, and Josh snitched), Laura purposefully tears off again. This is nominally a real move toward separation but is implicitly just another test of love. She wants to measure not only how much her family actually cares about her but whether they can, via some panic-induced reflection, start working on the shortcomings that have made her feel an acute sense of unbelonging.

This is a pleasant, diverting movie, though it’s distractingly a bit at war with itself. Working off a script from Mark Goddard, you sense Silver (1977’s Between the Lines, 1988’s Crossing Delancey) wanting to dig more into the scenes suggesting something out of a more meaningful family drama but being pressured to keep things chronically light and quick-paced. Which is to say mold everything into what’s meant to be a zany family comedy with something to offer every member of a household. Inevitably it doesn’t really come together. There’s some especially clumsy comedy, like Melinda being attacked by a bee in a parked car (shot from the bug’s point of view), and the tendency by Goddard to make the bulk of the characters so overbroadly defined by one trait (Lewis’ obsession with her looks, Teigen’s puzzling obsession with American militarism) that they’re little more than cartoons let loose. There isn’t much here to fool us that any of these people are related: their postured antagonism is even more revealing than the fact that nobody really looks alike. Big Girls Don’t Cry can call to mind a poorly conceived one-season series on a kids TV network collapsed into a feature-length movie. 

There can be lovely touches hinting at the better movie that could have been, though. Late in Big Girls Don’t Cry, when David confesses to Barbara that he’s still in love with her and that he regrets the impulsiveness that ruined their relationship, Dunne’s sincerity and the moment’s openness throw you off. It feels like reality poking through a movie that rarely feels true. And when Stephanie, who for so much of the film is caricatured as an air-headed proto-Stevie Nicks type, reveals her uncertainty around her living situation to a sensitively listening Josh, you almost get annoyed at the film for so long confining her to the role of David’s ditzy, almost decorative new girlfriend. Especially playing opposite Futterman, Shelly, probably too good for this movie anyway, reveals a soulfulness — she’s a young woman realizing just how big the responsibilities waiting for her are — that stealthily makes Stephanie one of the film’s more memorable characters. 

Big Girls Don’t Cry predictably ends with Laura making peace with the truth that, for the time being, it might be wise to better communicate what’s pissing her off than run away from the sources of her anger. The rest of the family, of course, is also suggested to have grown from the whole ordeal. This movie is hardly as emotionally insightful as Silver’s best works, but at its finest — which is to say mellowest — we can picture the more finely tuned family dramedy shrouded by the film’s one-too-many overbaked moments.