One of the most defining aspects of a movie is its ability to convince the audience that it isn't a movie. Some of the best modern films are the ones that make you forget you're watching a movie and are instead experiencing a story through the eyes of the people you're watching. A script can make or break a movie. If the writing in a movie is incredibly realistic and convincing (i.e Schindler's List), then the movie becomes more of an experience than it does a piece of cinema. However, if the dialogue sounds like it written by someone with zero education just trying to make something out of nothing (i.e Baz Lurhmann's crap-tastic Romeo and Juliet), then the movie just becomes a chore to sit through and forces the audience to suffer along with the characters in the movie having the most negative backlash possible.
What made 'Short Term 12' so wonderful was the dialogue. And it's why this is one of the best movies I've seen in a very long time.
The subject of troubled teens is a really tough one to try and piece together. A lot of the time, when you start delving into deeper subjects such as abuse, neglect, and abandonment, especially in the realm of the modern teenager, there are 15 different cliched paths that open up in front of you. It takes a specific mindset of a director to try and work with the subject. Whether it's the abusive father, or the neglectful mother, or the uncontrollable anger, these are sad topics, but unfortunately modern film-making has made them very, very fragile to the openness of the modern cliche.
What makes 'Short Term 12' so much different from these other films is the angle that the film takes. We open with this new character, Nate, and immediately, the audience is thrown into the idea that Nate is our main character, and we are opening up to a story about his development and his interactions with these kids slowly improving over time. This is a huge cliche, and it makes for a very boring movie. If you want this sort of cliched trauma inflicted upon teenagers, watch 'Cyberbully.' Trust me. It's a grind.
However, Nate is far from the main character of this spectacle. The main character we are supposed to be focusing on is his partner and in-charge Brie Larson, who plays a woman broken by her past and trying to remedy it by surrounding herself with teenagers she can try and protect in the way that she wasn't. Normally, this would be a cliche in-of-itself, but what '12' does so ingenuously is lead the audience on, pretending to go a cliched route, then throwing you completely for a loop.
One of the most poignant examples of the dialogue in the movie is a very dark, grotesque scene about halfway through. Jaden, the picturesque 'gothic rebel' in the picture, is sitting with Brie's character, and it outlining a story about an octopus who befriends a shark, who constantly takes apart the octopus bit-by-bit in exchange for friendship. It doesn't take long for the audience to realize that Jaden isn't talking about sea creatures here; the shark is her father, and the octopus is Jaden. I almost walked out of the room, this scene hurt so badly to watch. There's a lot of silence in this particular moment of dialogue, mostly because of the audience's awareness of Brie's characters' horrible relationship with her father in the past. Because the dialogue carries an instigation of silence, the traumatic realization is very difficult for the audience to perceive, and it allows us to get a psychological insight not only into the constant pain that Jaden has to suffer at the hands of her merciless father, but also into the origins of empathy that Brie's character has for someone in Jaden's situation.
We see another example of this development with the character Mason. He's cool, funny, intelligent, has beautiful hair, a sick beard, and an attitude of a little kid. He's meant to provide comic relief throughout the movie, and often makes us smile when we see him on-screen with his (surprise!) girlfriend, Brie Larson. However, one of the most poignant moments of the film's dialogue comes during an instigation between Larson's character and Mason outside of a hospital, when we see Mason take on a different, more serious facade, telling his girlfriend in the heat of her psychological meltdown 'you need to LET ME INTO YOUR HEAD sometimes.' Psychological problems are an apparent theme throughout the majority of the film, not only the in troubled teens but also in the people who work in 12. Because we are given serious insights into the way that the characters interact, the psychological remedy of the dialogue really helps to give the aspect of seriousness and believable nature to character development and understanding.
It's the fact that the dialogue throughout the movie doesn't feel forced, or fake, or that it was even written down on a script. You can't tell that the characters have memorized a script, but instead it just feels like a bunch of people ingenuously advertising themselves as someone else. The dialogue flows throughout the movie, interwoven with periods of silence during more serious scenes of the movie. One of the prime reasons the movie doesn't have any sort of 'breaks' is because there's a set tone of dark optimism present throughout the movie, and because silence and dialogue are so ingeniously woven like a thread, it feels natural.
Dialogue can make or break a movie. It made 'The Breakfast Club,' and it broke 'Paranormal Activity 3.' 'Short Term 12' is a beautiful movie, made beautiful by the natural taste of it's crisp script. None of it feels forced, and none of it feels unnatural, and we can empathize with every one of the characters because it sounds as though they carry these natural voices, and that they aren't actors. It's that convincing nature of character interaction and script that makes the movie so poignant, and keeps it from delving into the realm of cliche.
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