Andrew Fleming's Nancy Drew

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From Page to Screen
Andrew Fleming’s Nancy Drew

by Christine Heppermann

Call it The Case of the Melding Decades. In this onscreen pastiche, America’s iconic girl detective pursues the bad guys’ SUV through the LA streets in her blue roadster and discovers clues in both cluttered attics and Google searches. While queuing up tunes for a party at the glamorously decrepit mansion she and her father (played by Tate Donovan) have rented after temporarily forsaking River Heights for Hollywood, our heroine opines that “downloading is cool but nothing sounds like vinyl.” Emma Roberts (Julia’s niece and actor Eric’s daughter), in plaid jumpers and matching headbands, plays a more pert version of the unflappable sleuth than the cool, regal, titian-haired Nancy familiar to most readers. But the calculated hodgepodge director Andrew Fleming has assembled manages to capture one of her most striking qualities: whether appearing in the 1930s original volumes or the 1960s revisions or the recent graphic novels, Nancy has always been an anomaly, whatever the time period.

After all, what typical teen from any era can perform an emergency tracheotomy with a knife and a ballpoint pen? Retrieve, with only a paperclip attached to a coil of string, a crucial piece of evidence from under the criminals’ noses? The film playfully acknowledges the appealing unreality of Nancy and the bubble-like world she inhabits. In a catty text message, a girl at Nancy’s LA high school compares her to Martha Stewart, and, though acting on different sides of the law, the two do perform similar roles (now THAT would have been a crackerjack case for Nance — The Clue at ImClone Inn). Nancy and Martha eke magic from an everyday life that the rest of us can only dream of replicating. But Emma Roberts’s Nancy is a lot more approachable than her literary counterpart. Roberts (just as toothy as her aunt) portrays Nancy as more Sandra Dee than Grace Kelly, the fresh-faced girl next door…who just happens to field calls from Scotland Yard.

In the movie, Nancy has vowed, at her father’s request, to give up “sleuthing” and be a “normal” teen (a funny glimpse of her on the train to Los Angeles shows her reluctantly putting down a book titled Evidence Is Everywhere and picking up InStyle). Nonetheless, she just so happens to find a Hollywood house for them that comes fully stocked with a murder mystery, a treasure trove of clues, and the standard creepy caretaker who, according to a neighbor, seems like “the drowning kittens type.” The subtext is that Nancy, at her essence, has never been ordinary, and that’s as it should be. Trying to imagine a Nancy Drew who doesn’t sleuth would be like trying to imagine a Harry Potter without his scar.

As is often the case in the books, the specifics of the plot, here involving a murdered movie star’s secret love child and lost will, are less interesting than Nancy’s process of fitting them all together. Of course, her new house turns out to contain a secret passageway, and, of course, her search for the will has her hunting through antique lacquered boxes in Chinatown rather than, say, sifting through hanging files. Even more satisfying than these cheesy exotic details is the way Nancy stubbornly yet decorously navigates adult bureaucracy, bribing a government clerk for information not with cold hard cash, but with one of housekeeper Hannah Gruen’s (appearing only briefly in an early scene) blonde brownies.

The film’s visual contrast between Nancy and the uncouth modern teens at her Hollywood high school serves to make the latter seem beastly and even more outlandish than she is. A panorama of a school cafeteria lunch table observes pile after disheveled pile of Cheetos and other unappetizing-looking processed foods before settling on Nancy’s wholesome, geometrically precise display—a sandwich cut into four equal triangles, julienned vegetables of matching width and length, etc. In the pointless but tolerable role of Nancy’s wisecracking, younger male sidekick, Corky (Josh Flitter) feeds her such pick-up lines as: “I think the ability to sleuth is an attractive quality in a woman.” But his faux slickness provides no real challenge to her eternal beau, the squeaky clean Ned Nickerson (Max Thieriot), when he pops up in LA for a visit. The film’s harshest portrayal is saved for the two Mean Girls (Daniella Monet and Kelly Vitz), who have nothing but withering comments for the overachieving detective until they lay eyes on her hunky L.L. Bean-clad boyfriend. The girls get their comeuppance when a saleswoman at a trendy boutique, where they’ve taken Nancy for a makeover, deems them fashion disasters and praises Nancy’s homemade dress for its “sincerity.” Sincere might not be quite the right word to describe this cinematic tribute; but it does convey that Nancy has always been and always will be a little bit better — classier, braver, more successful, etc. — than we are, and we wouldn’t have her any other way.