The Film Reports

4.5 stars

Drama, Romance

The Truth About Jane is a movie I thought I had heard about but it was a made-for-tv movie and the imdb page shows only two connections, so i’m not sure if i’m making up memories. Regardless, I’m really glad I did watch it, it’s earnest and honest. It’s 2000’s version of Love, Simon.

The film starts with a a quick run-through of Jane’s (Ellen Muth) life, ages 0-16. We see how close her and her mother (Stockard Channing) are before landing on magical number 16 of her life when Taylor (Alicia Lagano) joins Jane’s class and she begins to grow more distant from her mother while coming to terms that she might be gay.

Her “struggle” with coming to terms with her sexuality is one of the reasons why I did enjoy this movie so much. It’s very clearly a struggle for Jane – she asks if kissing a girl makes her gay – but it’s accompanied by a voice over of Jane’s inner voice which is insightful and funny, and light in tone. It’s balanced. It also follows a cute love story between Jane and Taylor. It’s a novel thing to have such a thing so I enjoyed the representation of lesbians being innocent and really quite adorable.

One more reason why I liked this is the second half of the plot which is about Janice, Jane’s mother, struggling to come to terms with Jane’s sexuality. I don’t know how the general public viewed gay people back in 2000 but it was a lot more progressive than I had anticipated. While Janice does love her daughter (she says so quite a lot), there seems to be so many factors that makes her despair. She does cross that line from being a caring mother to homophobic parent quickly and then you see everybody around her trying to cope with that too. She’s a very complicated character.

It’s not what I expected, that is for sure. It’s perhaps a lot more representative of the reality of having homophobic parents than I have seen before. It was refreshing to see this in 2019, which is to say that this was not exaggerated or given a movie makeover like many movies and tv shows have a tendency to do when it comes to LGBT people and issues.

I wouldn’t watch this with anybody that has homophobic tendencies but it was eye-opening and I would say a part of LGBT film history.

Watch this: with the comfort of supportive friends.