Alphabetical Movie – The Impossible Years

The Impossible Years is a film dripping with faux 60’s feminism.  It thinks it is about empowerment and rebellion.  It is really just a film in which we are taught that female empowerment is all about teenaged girls turing into respectable young women as soon as they find the right man.

Theoretially a comedy, the movie stars David Niven as a psychologist who is supposedly an expert on teenagers but can’t manage to keep his own daugther in line.  This has a lot more to do with his inability to follow his own advice than with any shortcoming on the part of his daughter.

His daugther, with whom we are meant to sympathize, is juggling boys who are pretty much rapists, deadbeats and vandals.   Yep.  One of ’em tries to rape her.  Twice.

And her father blames it on her.

Ah the 60’s!

At least the rapist isn’t driving his motorcycle across the lawn or wrecking a car.  Those actions, at least, dad blames on the people who did it.  His daughter just thinks he’s being a jackass when he does.

Late in the film, after she has impetuously gone off to Vegas to marry the man of her dreams (who is also twice her age), she gets to lecture her parents on the fact that their real problem is that they are old and she isn’t.  Strangely, it is the opinion of the writer that she is completely correct.

I gotta say, if I had a 17 year old daughter who ran off and married a 30 something guy, I don’t think my problems with the situation would have anything to do with the fact that I was old.

I only have sons so the major message I took from the movie was to attempt to ensure when my boys are 17 years old, they don’t try to force themselves on 17 year old girls.

There are only so many ways that the young woman in the film can tell her parents that they are not the boss of her and she uses every single one of them.  I mean sure, she is still living in their house and her friends are regularly wrecking their things but she is asserting her independence!  Isn’t that worth some broken furniture?

What’s worse – she goes from being a free love rebel to a proper 60’s housewife the moment she marries the 30+ year old guy she’s apparently been in love with since the beginning of the film.

So I’m led to believe that young women should be allowed to rebel any way they want to (even if it is damaging to property or potentially to her person) because as soon as she finds the right man, she’ll simmer right on down.

And once she simmers right on down, she’ll have her entire life figured out and her parents will become useless vestigial organs who need to let her go (at seventeen) because they have done everything they can for her.  Now they just have to hope that her 35 year old husband will treat her right and give them lots of grandchildren so they can die happy.

Or something.

It is really hard to like a film when you hate every person in it.  The Impossible Years is filled with ulikable people doing ulikable things to other unlikable people.

Thank goodness I got the movie for free.  Anyone want it?