Film Review: The Honor List Shows The Saving Grace of Female Friendships
SYNOPSIS: The summer before high school, Piper, Sophie, Isabella, and Honor are inseparable; by senior year, they barely speak. When tragedy strikes before graduation, the former best friends reluctantly put their differences aside and reunite to complete a forgotten bucket list. THE HONOR LIST explores the complexities of friendships, family, love, loss, and high school.
If you and your friends are perusing on the laptop for a solid, “Netfix and “Chill” kind of film, The Honor List does it. The story of how four best friends rekindle their once invincible bond has enough melodrama to make it kind of addictive. You will cry with its sappiness, and revel in its loveliness.
When you are a young woman, your friends are your life. I was, literally, raised with the idea, “Boyfriends come and go, but good friends remain.” Thus, friendships can be deeper, at times, then the relationships we have with our romantic counterparts. Keeping with that mentality Meghan Rienks’ Piper, Sasha Pieterse’s Isabella, Karrueche Tran’s Sophie, and Arden Cho’s Honor form an immediate chemistry. Any woman/ girl who has loved their friend and confided in them, like a diary, will fall for their reminiscences and the adorable/ laughable quests they perform in honor of Honor.
When Honor passes away, Piper, Isabella, and Sophie are pushed forward to put aside pettiness to reignite, redefine, and relive what is friendship. It is tragic see someone young go, and each character has their moment to mourn Honor. Throughout the film, you can feel how Honor’s nobility affected these girls; Cho giving her a kind grace. Although, it is not so clear why they grew so part. One can assume “life is life” when you are a teenager, and, sometimes, a small wave of disagreement can become a tsunami. Either way, with how much fun the girls have, from a pizza run to stealing their Highschool’s mascot, you wish that it was not death that reminded them of the meaning of life. Still, their adventures show how much your friends save you.
From parents separating (Isabella) to struggling with sexuality (Sophie), The Honor List is filled with relatable storylines, and empowering performances from each of its actresses. Tran, Rienks, and Pieterse’s performance give authentic weights to what it is to be a young girl. While the film could get “soapy”, at times, these actresses always deliver genuinely framed performances. Written by Marilyn Fu and directed by Elissa Down, having two women helm a film about female friendships does allow The Honor List to better approach the insecurities of young women like, weight issues, dealing with objectification, and the general, human struggle to feel confident as you are. In addition, they can display women standing by women in love and empowering strength.
In The Honor List, each character feels genuine in their flaws, quirks, charm, laughs, and issues, which again I attribute to having two women create a film about being young women. It seems logical, but it does not happen often in Hollywood. Yet, all viewers will note the difference, and might confront their own challenges through each character’s journey or, at least, remember how powerful/necessary it is, as a woman, to have a good, female friend. Honor List Comes Out On Demand and Digital on May 11.
