This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Whip It, the directorial debut of actress Drew Barrymore, is a fun, breezy, grrrrrrl empowerment movie with enormous heart and crowd-pleasing muscle. Surprisingly moving and pervasively funny, this celebration of female camaraderie is, to borrow a word, pure bliss.

Bliss (Ellen Page) doesn’t belong. Not at home where her mother (Marcia Gay Harden), an ex-beauty pageant queen, is raising her daughters to follow in her footsteps, nor anywhere else in her rinky-dink Texas town. While her mom dreams up her next pageant gown, her father (Daniel Stern) disappears to carry on an affair with a television set permanently tuned to ESPN. Desperate for a way out, the tomboy stumbles upon a flier for roller derby tryouts in nearby Austin. What she finds there are muscled, tattooed women careening around a track on skates while delivering violent, bone-crushing blows to anyone who gets in their way. Bliss is instantly hooked.

Mild-mannered Bliss makes the team and joins the Hurl Scouts, led by team captain Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig). Soon, Babe Ruthless is born and roller derby has its newest celebrity. Bliss couldn’t have chosen a sport more at odds with her mother’s ideal of femininity, but then again, she has no plans of ever telling her mother. But when the derby championship versus the Hurl Scouts’ arch rivals (led by a deliciously nasty Juliette Lewis) falls on the same night as her mother’s beauty pageant, Bliss has to decide whether to stick with her new family and let her mother down, or give up the one thing she loves in order to keep the peace at home.

Ellen Page is like those e-mail forwards you get containing dozens of pictures of kittens, each one more adorable than the last. The dazzling Juno star can, quite simply, do no wrong. The rest of the cast — which includes the luminous stunt-woman-turned-actress Zoë Bell, Andrew Wilson (the most overlooked of the Wilson bros.), Eve, Jimmy Fallon, Landon Pigg (as Bliss’ floppy-haired boyfriend who looks as if he stepped directly from a 1960’s British mod film) and Drew Barrymore — is simply terrific. Two women particularly stand out, Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development) who plays Bliss’ precocious best friend, and, of course, Marcia Gay Harden.

It would have been so easy for Bliss’ steel magnolia of a mother to cross the line into one-dimensional caricature, but that’s why you hire an actress of Harden’s caliber, to ensure she always remains human — a jumble of misfired contradictions that, in the end, want only what is best for her child, wants only what she never had, wants only for Bliss to find the wings to fly far away, even if she lacks the parental language to express it. The truth is, Barrymore and roller derby star-turned-screenwriter Shauna Cross handle this mother/daughter dynamic so very well, that it isn’t until the credits are rolling that we realize that Whip It is basically just a traditional sports movie, and a fairly formulaic one at that. However, the parallel family story is done so well and with such impartial compassion, that the by-the-numbers skeletal structure of the film goes nearly unnoticed. And that is the real miracle…whip.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.