PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 05/31/05)


Ann Brashares’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a devilishly tricky novel to adapt. A cumbersome title, a sprawling story with themes of love, sex, death, divorce, and female friendship, and four strong, distinct leads all add up to something well-nigh impossible to condense into a two-hour film without savagely shortchanging the source material.

The good news is that ninety percent of Sisterhood shoehorns in all those disparate elements with grace and precision, and the other ten percent includes only a few moments when the book’s Ya-Ya Sisterhood–like mysticism gets too silly. The film succeeds on the strength of the four actresses, first and foremost America Ferrera, who beautifully essays the role of narrator Carmen. In the film’s most touching scene, Ferrera delivers a stinging, heartbreaking monologue to Bradley Whitford, playing her father, and imbues it with skill, emotion, and fury. Brilliant, difficult, and eminently memorable, the scene and Ferrera stand out as the film’s best.

Alexis Bledel, Amber Tamblyn, and Blake Lively play the other four "sisters," childhood friends who are spending their first summer apart. Of the three, Tamblyn is most talented. Her morose, cynical character, Tibby, could easily come off as a temperamental brat. It’s a testament to Tamblyn’s skill that she’s so relatable. Bledel and Lively are mostly eye candy, but both are adequate in their respective storylines.

Director Ken Kwapis has the unenviable task of condensing the first fifteen years of the characters’ lives into the first five minutes of the film, and the results are predictably rushed and disjointed. Once the film catches its stride about twenty minutes in, however, Kwapis tells the stories fluently and with a clear affection for the actresses and their characters. Sisterhood inhabits a tricky slot—the subject matter is a little mature for tween audiences, and too glossed over for adults—but succeeds, due entirely to charismatic Tamblyn and devastating Ferrera.

—Sara Brady