My Girl (1991)

(On DVD, March 2019) There’s a reason why My Girl remains a bit of a traumatic film for an entire generation of viewers, and that reason will become blindingly obvious to even the least observant viewer by the time the film hits its third act. (Spoilers ahead, obviously!)  It does start innocently enough, for quirky values of “innocent”—here we have baby-faced Macaulay Culkin, fresh off his breakout hit Home Alone, playing the friend to our protagonist, a cute 11-year-old girl (Anna Chlumsky) with a widowed dad (Dan Aykroyd, quite likable), a funeral parlour as a home, a senile grandma and a writer’s soul. It takes place in the 1960s, further fostering a false sense of nostalgia for a simpler time (“Nixon renominated”) bolstered by the small-town setting of the film. We’ve seen enough of those coming-of-age films to understand that there’s no way anything will go wrong in such a setting, right? And then, well, then … the bees strike hard and kill one of the main characters, shocking a generation of kids (no, seriously; search for “my girl trauma”) and making this film into something else entirely—an approachable discussion of death and grieving, or maybe a bid for relevance ensuring that we still reference My Girl when so many other family movies from the early 1990s have been forgotten to time. The bait-and-switch (but is it, with the foreshadowing?) is something—coming-of-age comedy one moment, heavy drama the next, with a sequence nothing short of horrifying as the linchpin between both. There are films I regret not seeing in theatres when they came out, but My Girl isn’t one of them—I’m rather glad I’m seeing it now than at an impressionable age.