To be fair, there is charm here, in the form of Amber Tamblyn. She plays Tibby, the pierced alternachick forced to spend her summer working at Wallman's (i.e., Wal-Mart) in an ugly red smock. Tamblyn is adorably put-upon, conveying intelligence -- and therefore impatience -- with edgy conviction. Faring less well is America Ferrera, the spitfire from Real Women Have Curves. Her presence (not, to be clear, her size) is too big and too real for Sisterhood, a teen movie (with all the condescension that Hollywood believes teen movies require) playing at serious issues. And then there's Alexis Bledel, whose beautiful-but-inaccessible Lena is likable for a total of 10 seconds, during which she cries about her inability to love and dives into the sea. Unfortunately, the moment is ruined with the appearance of Kostos (Michael Rady), the Greek cheeseball whose job is to crack Lena's shell. (Newcomer Blake Lively, the fourth girl in the sisterhood, does a decent enough job with what little she's given.)
Part of the trouble with Sisterhood stems from its failure to adapt the best-selling novel of the same title by Ann Brashares. The rest of the trouble comes from its success in doing so. The novel takes four best friends and spreads them around the globe for a summer, sending one to Greece (Lena), another to Baja (Bridget, played by Lively), and a third to South Carolina (Carmen, played by Ferrera). Binding the four girls is the titular pair of pants, jeans that magically fit all of them despite their differing sizes, which they send to each other throughout the summer. With four plots, even a two-hour film lacks the time to fully develop any single one. The result is a constant feeling of summary. The minor characters are mostly types -- and unsatisfying ones, at that.
Rather than attempt to dramatize the meaning behind the action, the film simply lobs it at us. Whereas we might be shown what it looks like to open your heart to love for the first time, or to run away from your feelings and into romantic intrigue, the film prefers to tell us. Sisterhood's opening scenes are poisoned with explanatory voiceover directly from the book; its final half hour is fully occupied with a kind of self-therapy, in which every character psychologizes her way to a resolution. Intead of sketching a few "types" of girls and saddling them with issues, Brashares should have given her heroines complex, interesting personalities and allowed the conflict to arise from that.
