Now and Then
Things will happen in your life that you can’t stop, but that’s no reason to shut out the world
Wednesday marks the official start of summer, and with that, I am excited to announce that today is the first Monday of my Movie Mondays summer series, where I'm diving into all my favorite summer movies and always looking for suggestions on Instagram. Choosing the first movie to cover was a no-brainer because it's one I've watched every summer since I was a kid, and it resonates with me more than anything else I'll cover this season.
My introduction to some of my favorite summer movies came from my mom dropping me and my sister off at our cousin's house during the summer while she was at work. When we weren't playing The Sims or drawing with chalk outside, we were in the living room watching 90s movies that I wasn't alive for, but my cousin remembered vividly from her own childhood. My favorite was Now and Then.
Now and Then is criminally underrated for too many reasons to list, but it features some of the best 90s actresses, and for anyone preoccupied with the 70s, it's a must-watch. The movie follows a group of four friends, Roberta, Samantha, Teeny, and Chrissy, who reunite as adults because of a pact they made as kids. The film was released in 1995 and takes place in the present day with Rosie O'Donnell as Roberta, Demi Moore as Samantha, Melanie Griffith as Teeny, and Rita Wilson as Chrissy. As the characters reminisce about their childhood in Shelby, Indiana, the film flashes back to the summer of 1970. In the flashback scenes, Christina Ricci portrays Roberta, Gaby Hoffman plays Samantha, Thora Birch plays Teeny, and Ashleigh Aston Moore plays Chrissy.
One aspect that makes Now and Then one of my favorite summer movies is its skip-less soundtrack, featuring The Jackson 5, The Monkees, and The Temptations. Its soundtrack sets the film in its time period of the summer of 1970 and introduced me to the power of music in film. A lot of tv shows and movies set in previous decades have missed the mark when it comes to properly expressing the time period. Shows that have done an exquisite job are Stranger Things and Yellowjackets, which both put effort into the music of that time period. I'm still blown away by the Stranger Things season 2 trailer, which used Michael Jackson's "Thriller" to convey its Halloween 1984 setting.
The music in Now and Then has the same effect. It takes viewers through the story using the songs of the summer. You can learn a lot about someone by the kind of music they listen to, and from present-day Chrissy singing The Jackson 5's "I'll Be There" into her mirror to the four girls riding their bikes to "Knock Three Times" by Tony Orlando & Dawn, we know these characters inside out by the end of the film.
A very on-the-nose musical moment happens when the characters are at their local diner, and Sam's mother, who is on the brink of a divorce, appears outside dressed like a go-go dancer. "These Boots Are Made For Walking" begins right before adult Sam narrates, "I had no idea why, but earlier that Summer, my mom began to dress like Nancy Sinatra."
Another of my favorites is when the girls go to a local softball game where "I Want You Back" by The Jackson 5 plays. This is where a boy tells Roberta that girls can't play softball, and in response, she punches him in the face and continues to beat him up until he makes a disrespectful comment about her late mother, prompting Sam to beat him up too. It's one of the most satisfying moments in the film.
However, there's a lot more to Now and Then than it's a phenomenal playlist. At its core, Now and Then is a movie about girls growing up in the time before iPhones, Social Media, and excessive streaming platforms. When they had to make their own fun by having seances in the cemetery, solving the mystery of Dear Johnny's death, and feuding with a group of brothers called The Wormers. Now and Then is a movie about girlhood. More specifically, it's about the last summer the main characters could still consider themselves girls as they slowly but surely were growing up and growing apart.
Girlhood In Now and Then
Now and Then was written, directed, and produced by women, which I've always found to be the reason it so well represents what it's like to be a young girl. I. Marlene King wrote the screenplay for Now and Then, though she's best known for an endeavor that would come years later. In 2010, King launched the TV series Pretty Little Liars, based on Sara Shepard's book series of the same name. While PLL fans have mixed opinions about the show's later seasons and some of the big reveals throughout its run, it was undoubtedly a success because King knows how to write from the perspective of young women.
Now and Then dives into girlhood unapologetically, from Roberta taping down her boobs because she's a tomboy living with her dad and three older brothers to Chrissy being wrongly informed about sex from her mother and Teeny stuffing her bra with pudding-filled water balloons.
It's likely if you watch Now and Then, you'll find at least one character you resonate the most with. I can relate to Teeny and her big dreams, but I resonate the most with Sam. Interestingly enough, my cousin always thought I looked like Sam when I was younger, and she also grows up to become a writer, so maybe that's part of my connection to her.
However, a lot of it comes down to her family dynamic. Sam stays up reading at night while her parents scream at each other in the other room, and one night she watches her father leave, confirming her parent's divorce. She hates the idea of not having the perfect family, which she thinks everyone else has, only to realize later this was never the case.
As a child of divorce myself, I always knew what it felt like to not be like my friends. These days we talk a lot about representation in films and television and why it's important to have characters other people can see themselves in. I understand this because characters like Sam made me feel less alone.
A moment of relief comes for Sam at the end of the movie when she confides in Teeny about her parents' divorce, confessing she lied to her friends about how well her parents got along. Teeny reminds her, "there are no perfect families. It's normal for things to be shitty." She points out that all the tv families who were seemingly perfect actually had problems of their own, explaining even The Brady Bunch had a chaotic dynamic.
As I mentioned, a big theme in Now and Then is that 1970 was the last summer the characters could be kids because they were growing up, and their circumstances that summer were making it harder for them to keep doing the things they always loved, like playing make-believe and fighting with the Wormers. Sam's parent's divorce put a damper on her happiness, turning her into the glum adult who shows up for the reunion in the present-day dressed in all black, confessing her parent's divorce made it impossible for her to find a lasting relationship in adulthood.
For Chrissy, she was starting to outgrow her overprotective parents, who wanted to shield her from the world while her friends grew up around her. Teeny was one plane ride away from Hollywood, determined to make her dreams of being an actress come true no matter what lengths she had to go to. As for Roberta, her days of taping her boobs ended when she kissed Scott Wormer, which simultaneously ended her days of fighting with him and his brothers.
This message is solidified at the end of the film after the girls find out the truth about Dear Johnny and right before Sam learns that the old man they always saw at the cemetery, who they called Crazy Pete, was actually Johnny's father and he was mourning the son he lost to a violent murder, not haunting the graveyard. Sam and her friends thought they had resurrected Johnny during one of their seances because of his broken tombstone. The truth is a worker accidentally knocked it over with his tractor. The final seance of the film was the characters' last attempt at remaining kids and believing in things, only kids could believe in.
"I knew at that moment, our days of playing make believe were over. As we grow older it becomes difficult to just believe. It's not that we don't want to, but too much has happened and we can't"-Sam, Now and Then
Despite the knowledge that they were growing up and growing apart, they still bought the pink treehouse they saved up for all summer and put it in Chrissy's backyard. They later sit in it in the present-day scenes, passing around Chrissy's newborn baby that she gives birth to toward the end of the film.
The concept of saving up all summer for a treehouse is not a concept most 21st-century kids are familiar with, which is another aspect of Now and Then's appeal. Something I've always found very boring is watching movies or television shows where the characters are communicating back and forth on their cell phones. The best thing about films is their ability to take you out of the real world for an hour or two, and Now and Then's 70s setting has always allowed me to imagine I live in that world too.
"The treehouse was supposed to bring us more independence, but what the summer actually brought was independence from each other"-Sam, Now and Then
I wrote in an article about Steven King once that I think the appeal of his stories and film adaptations like 2017's IT is that they're set in times where kids could ride around on their bikes all day without having to text their parents about their whereabouts every hour. That type of freedom was only available in earlier decades and is present in Now and Then, as well as many other callbacks to the 70s.
Now and Then’s 70s Culture
Whether in Fashion or Music, my generation has a preoccupation with the 70s, leading to the success of Hulu's ten-episode mini-series Daisy Jones & The Six, based on Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel of the same title. Now and Then might not be my favorite summer movie had it been set in any other time period.
There's a new social media trend where users try to decide if an actor's face looks like it could fit into a period piece, like Elle Fanning, or if they look like they know what Instagram is, like Madeline Cline and Camila Morrone. This was a non-issue when Now and Then was made in the 90s, still, casting directors did a flawless job.
From the clothes, which included a lot of stripes to the set design, which featured an assortment of orange and yellow floral wallpapers, the filmmakers dedicated themselves to perfecting the setting. There were little things like the characters playing Red Rover, Teeny reading a 70s edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, and the characters sitting on the curb eating ice-cream. There were also more prominent scenes that really spoke to the times and related back to the characters' stories.
When the girls ride their bikes to Greenfield to meet with a witch who could tell them more about Dear Johnny's passing, they run into a soldier who just returned from the Vietnam War. Initially, they're naive, seeing the soldier as a hero and curious about whether or not the United States is winning.
He lets them in on the truth about the world, that it's not as sunny as it seems like it is from their small town in Indiana, though Sam is already waking up to this due to her parents' divorce. Chrissy is later scared when she realizes the soldier is a hippie because her parents told her negative things about hippies. Her friends' ability to get along with him further proves that she's overprotected and maturing at a slower pace than they are.
Though at the end of the film, back in the present day, the characters learn that as much as they've grown apart and evolved since that summer, they're all still dealing with a lot of the same stuff. Their reunion is a wake-up call for Sam, who remembers something Crazy Pete told her about not allowing the bad things that have happened cause her to shut out the world, which she'd been doing her whole life.
"Things will happen in your life that you can't stop, but that's no reason to shut out the world. There's a purpose for the good and for the bad"- Pete, Now and Then
The film concludes with a very full circle ending where the main characters go next door to play Red Rover with the neighborhood kids, the same way they did as children. Despite what happened in their childhood, Now and Then ends on a lighter note where even though Sam admits she's not happy, she seems optimistic about her future. I love Now and Then for all it represents, from the 70s music to the stories of girlhood, there was no better start to my Movie Mondays summer series.
I love that there are a few things that we both touched on!
I love how in depth you went, and I completely feel the same way about my relationship to Sam.