Drew Barrymore's character, Beverly, the focus of "Riding in Cars with Boys," struggles to come to terms with and accept her true identity.
The film opens with a grown-up Barrymore riding alongside her son, Jason (Adam Garcia), in, surprise, a car. There is obvious tension between the two who pass for lovers instead of mother and son -- the age difference is so deceiving.
Jason provides the audience with brief snippets of narration throughout the movie, leading to flashbacks of first his mother's teenage life, and later his own childhood.
The first flashback is reminiscent of the majority of today's films in the teen-movie genre, to which Barrymore contributed her part as Josie in "Never Been Kissed." In fact, 15-year-old Beverly is an eerie return to Barrymore's character in the aforementioned film. The high school elite painfully reject Bev and her loser entourage, despite her creativity, intelligence and penchant for beautiful prose.
Ashamed of her inability to win the football-wielding boy of her dreams, she stumbles into the arms of a high school dropout, Ray (Steve Zahn), who comes to her rescue and wins her heart in the back of a '57 Chevy.
From here on out the movie takes several interesting twists, morphing first from cheap teenage entertainment to a surreal, almost hurriedly frantic parody of a made-for-TV-movie plot line.
After confirming her teenage pregnancy, Beverly and Ray decide to marry, against Bev's better judgment. Director Penny Marshall depicts a horrific surface account of the wedding, reception and honeymoon evening. The events appear to be the work of an adolescent dreamer, with Beverly and her husband acting out the role of newlyweds as convincingly as freshmen in a school play. Who lets their pregnant, 15-year-old daughter marry a high school dropout, then throws a wedding reception catered by what looks like The Old Country Buffet?
Yet as soon as the honeymoon's over, reality abruptly sets in and the viewers cringe as Beverly's nave dreams of a college education and writing career shatter in the wake of her motherly responsibilities and depressed lifestyle. Expecting a sob story of love breaking all barriers, one finds instead the ensuing bitterness which accompanies a life-changing decision.
Beverly continuously displays selfishness and childish ignorance, blaming her plight on the birth of her son and shamelessly treating motherhood as both a burden and a joke. The audience begins to find it hard to sympathize with Barrymore's character. Disgust would quickly yield to pure hatred was her screen presence not so generally likeable.
In the middle of the movie, Bev gets inebriated with her friend, Tina, while Jason plays in the background. She confesses, "Sometimes I don't know if I love him or I have to love him."
That fact is certainly obvious as she repeatedly dashes any hopes he might have of a normal childhood, treating him as the weakest link in a losing team who bares the brunt of the blame.
Even Ray, who eventually is subtly asked to kick his heroin habit or leave the family (he chooses the latter), earns the label of being the better parent by showing Jason the love he deserves.
The movie, progresses and the viewer gets more and more frequent returns to the present day, where Jason attempts to tell his mother about his decision to transfer colleges for true love.
Barrymore comes through with an impressive performance and keeps the audience busy grieving for her disappointments and wincing at her heartless rebuffs. The entire theater, however, sits stupefied at such an abrupt conclusion to an emotional whirlwind, asking, "If her true feelings were ready to be unearthed all along, what took so long?"