Four of Hollywood's smartest young actresses play lifelong best friends in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
The title of the film, which opened yesterday, refers to a magical pair of blue jeans that fit each girl perfectly despite their very different body types. The producers were lucky to get Alexis Bledel, America Ferrera, Blake Lively and Amber Tamblyn to even read the script, let alone get past that gimmick.
"That script just sat on my desk for months," admits Ferrara, star of the acclaimed independent drama Real Women Have Curves and an international relations major at University of Southern California. "My agent was like, 'Have you read it? Have you read it?' I'm like, `I'll get to it,' and I finally did, begrudgingly so.
"But halfway through, I thought, `Wow, this is great.' I wasn't expecting this story of teenagers to have such complexity, because what we're so used to seeing these days are such stereotyped, very petty problems."
"What was really special when I first read it was how it didn't stereotype women, which I think is a rarity for films about young women," adds Tamblyn, headliner of the just-canceled Joan of Arcadia. "Even though there were issues going on outside of the group, the girls' strength was still in the core of their bond, their friendship."
Based on Ann Brashares' best selling novel, the film indeed covers such subjects as ethnic identity, forbidden love, forbidden lust, communication barriers with parents, outgrowing adolescent nihilism and coping with death. And all without a single prom or catfight over some boy or anyone turning into a princess.
The pants thing, though? As three of the four friends head off to different parts of the world during their 16th summer, they agree to ship the jeans back and forth to one another, along with letters describing their experiences.
"The story has a clothing hook in the title because that's important in a market that's saturated with material for teenage girls," notes Bledel, who plays daughter Rory on the highly literate TV series Gilmore Girls. "To throw this delicately told story about families and friendship and emotions and things that do matter out there without any kind of hook, it might get lost, and nobody would be interested."
Brashares, who says more than 3.2 million copies of Sisterhood and its two sequels are in print, knows that her readership won't be all that surprised, except for maybe a few minor changes in some of the characters' stories.
