TEENS

A loving but naive mother discovers the uncomfortable truth about her daughter’s personal life in this cautionary tale of peer pressure, teen sex, and growing up too fast.

Hannah Vogel (Alexis Dziena, Wonderland) is the perfect teenager – a respectful, smart, levelheaded, middle-class straight-A student. Her mother Trish (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden, ‘Mystic River’) and father Bill (Gary Hudson, ‘Jasper, Texas’) have never had reason to doubt her, mistrust her, or worry that she’d ever be susceptible to peer pressure. But Hannah has just turned fourteen. Her body is changing. So are her personal feelings and her increasingly curious attitude toward the opposite sex. Like her peers at school-both male and female-Hannah is desperate to be popular. Suddenly, she attracts the attention of high school hunk Nick Harmon (Mike Erwin, ‘Hulk’).

Hannah knows her parents will object to her dating a sixteen-year-old. Trish does protest, but Hannah’s father thinks his responsible daughter has earned the right to use her own judgment. Her decision is to graduate from innocent affection with Nick to something far more intimate. When Trish discovers the extent of her young daughter’s active sex life, she attempts to alert the local community of apathetic parents. In the process, she and her daughter become ostracised, but it’s too late for damage control. One of Hannah’s school friends has become a poster child for indiscriminate sexual activity and now fears that she has contracted a sexually transmitted disease. As many other students become vulnerable to the same fears-and realities, Hannah and her family struggle with their own personal truths and the consequences of living too fast, too soon.

A must-see for parents and their teenagers, She’s Too Young is a dramatic and fiercely honest movie about family communication, self-respect, and the moral foundation that can withstand the harsh realities of life; written by Richard Kletter (‘After Amy’) and directed by Tom McLoughlin (‘Murder in Greenwich’).