It’s past time for Uptown Girls, almost universally panned when it first hit theaters 20 years ago, to be widely reconsidered and celebrated as a Y2K New York City fairy tale. Sure, the plot is far-fetched, and the ending in particular is wrapped up in a nice, convenient little bow, but Uptown Girls is a unique story about what young women can learn from each other.

Uptown Girls goes to darker emotional places than most other light hearted “chick flicks” of the early 2000s, and features career-best performances from Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning, as well as cameos from aughts superstars Mark McGrath and Nas. Uptown Girls was shot by legendary New York City cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who has also photographed the city for heavyweights like Martin Scorsese and Mike Nichols. In his 3-star 2003 review, Roger Ebert defended the film against its haters, dismissing “all cavils about the movie’s logic and plausibility as beside the point,” asserting that “this is not a movie about plot but about personalities.” Ebert was able to see and hear Molly and Ray as vastly different, but equally emotionally complex characters, in a way that his peers were blind to at the time.

…

Molly’s unflagging brightness and Ray’s grim cynicism are both completely earnest reactions to having been pushed into a position where they must parent themselves throughout childhood, and into young adulthood, in Molly’s case. Molly has chosen to never grow up, postponing adulthood for as long as possible, whereas Ray grew up too fast. What makes Uptown Girls so compelling is watching Molly parent her own inner child through parenting Ray, which comes to a head in the infamous Coney Island spinning teacups scene.

…

While not the only contemporary critic to be positive on the film, Ebert was able to see beyond the glitzy surface, bravely standing apart in his refusal to rely on gender bias to express disapproval of a film. Maybe the most significant thing Ebert praised about Uptown Girls was its performances; specifically, he compared Murphy’s comedic talents to those of Lucille Ball. “Molly Gunn is a comic original, vulnerable and helpless, well-meaning and inept, innocent and guileless…Murphy’s performance has a kind of ineffable mischievous innocence about it.”

Indeed, one could imagine a scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy attempts to get a job at a luxury bedding store, and consequently falls asleep on one of the beds, as Molly does in Uptown Girls. Murphy’s face is pure Ball as she realizes (too late) that she’s about to get smacked in the face with a swinging door, in a moment where she needed to look particularly dignified. Thankfully, Ebert was able to recognize that an actress’ performance should not be judged solely on “likability,” but on its more palpable merits, such as comedic timing and vulnerability. Ebert was also more favorable than most critics toward Fanning’s performance. He wrote that “Ray does seem prematurely old…in the case of Dakota Fanning, I think we are looking at good acting.”

...

Uptown Girls might still not be taken seriously today by the larger community of serious film critics and historians, but the film has found its audience of lonely young women trying to find their place in the world. If you search “Uptown Girls” on social media, you’ll find a sea of girls posting about their emotional connection to the film, and of course, their love of Murphy’s performance. Some of this could very well be written off as 2000s nostalgia, but a lot of love for Uptown Girls comes from a place of deep sadness, both for the girls that we once were and the girls we could have been.

— Katarina Docalovich, “Uptown Girls Reminds Us to Connect with Our Inner Child, 20 Years”

"[M]ost often the figure representing the impersonal logic of protocol is Andy’s deputy, Barney Fife. Played by the immensely talented Don Knotts, Barney is both the comedic relief and bureaucratic foil to Andy’s localism. Running gags are built upon Barney’s trigger-happy nervousness and open love of the Law, with all its binding rules and jargon. He often urges Andy to modernize, to embrace the latest crime-fighting methods and gadgets. Barney’s flaw — and what makes him hilarious — is that he tries too hard to be a serious police officer in a rural town untouched by hard crime. He quotes legal codes to Andy, who either doesn’t know or has forgotten them. Andy doesn’t need to remember the technical name for a minor offense. He understands that townspeople, not codes, are the governing factor, even if that logic sometimes backfires on him.

Watching this show as an older viewer, I came to realize that Andy and Barney symbolize two competing ways of life that struggled against one another in the 20th century and continue to do so today.

...

Though Andy exhibits strength and virtue, he is not hotheaded. Nor is he the brawny hero that busts in at the last minute with guns blazing to vanquish the villain, who almost pulls off the caper. It may take him until the last minute to carry out his plan, but he does not represent the kind of heroic machismo so prevalent in superhero films today. More often than not Andy fights with his mind, inasmuch as he fights at all. He is strong in a silent way, a stoic fortitude without the sturm und drang of Brando or the social Darwinism of late-career John Wayne. Barney, on the other hand, is loud and quick to flashes of emotion. His wiry frame and nervous energy make him a wreck of a deputy, and it’s hilarious to watch him and Andy at odds, however low the stakes. Barney is a ludicrous figure, a clown, blissfully unaware of his arrogance, insecure and egotistical, and desirous of the kind of rules designed to control situations without thought. He exemplifies the neoliberal manager, the one that assumed control in the late 20th century. And though this figure was initially lampooned in American media, it came to be accepted as the only one to rule over a complex world.

¤ When several American television networks dropped most of the country-themed programming in the early 1970s — a move referred to as the “rural purge” — the likelihood that another Andy Taylor or Mayberry might be seen on TV was slimmed. In an attempt to market to suburban and urban audiences, major television networks mostly forgot about aging and rural populations. Suddenly there were fewer shows reflecting their lives. The kneejerk reaction is to consider rural audiences and their shows hillbilly, retrograde, simple-minded, or even racist. But it would also be callous to ignore other audiences altogether just to have around-the-clock Westerns and episodes of Red Skelton. I began to wonder what my parents would have watched without reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. Could it be, like some have said, that people enjoy the series because it presents a whitewashed utopia, a conservative paradise before Soul Train, MTV, and BET? In her article “Remembering Mayberry in White and Black,” memory studies scholar Kathleen McElroy writes about African Americans like herself who identify with The Andy Griffith Show even though only one episode in the entire series features a black actor with a speaking part (“a Chopin-playing football coach in Season 7,” McElroy notes). She cites several black writers who watch the series because it reflects their own experiences living in the rural South and who were not alienated by the paucity of black cast members. But even though some African-American viewers like McElroy conjure these “extra-memories,” as she calls them, to “complement […] Mayberry’s narrative,” what about the white viewers who voted for Donald Trump because they believed him to be a white, wealthy savior who could return the country to the conservative 1950s — in other words, to a time before civil rights? Why should anyone have to fill in the gaps of a television series with extra-memories to enjoy it? A site of both memory and oblivion, The Andy Griffith Show can be pleasing to some and uncomfortable to others. It’s a show that some might enjoy because it presents a white utopia and one that others can identify with because of its themes of doing good, serving communities, and reducing one’s ego. And viewers like McElroy and the writers she cites in her essay manage this tension by conjuring extra-memories to account for the erasure. It is possible that some people see in Donald Trump’s nativist message a return to Mayberry. But those who may suppose that miss the entire point of the series and equally misunderstand the philosophy of the character Andy Taylor. Writing for The Awl, Shani O. Hilton mentions that Griffith was often called “white trash” as a kid. When he created his series, Griffith didn’t “take a crack at edgier storylines involving race or gender,” which other series of the time did and usually failed offensively. Instead, he crafted a show about life in a small, working-class town where a given day’s itinerary might include little more than napping and watching the evening’s program on television. Mayberry is obviously utopian and overwhelmingly white, but Sheriff Andy Taylor not only believes society can always be made better but also understands no social project grand or local could usher in some kind of everlasting peace. The best you could do in Mayberry is good enough, and doing good is a daily job."

Grafton Tanner, "Make America Mayberry Again" for the Los Angeles Review of Books