Back in the day, a sweet little film like this would have found a happy home as an Afterschool Special, which all three networks ran half a dozen times each year, from 1972 through 1996. The thoughtful dramas were topical and/or gently instructive, aimed at the tween demographic, often helping them navigate interpersonal relationships.
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| Callie (Lexi Perkel) is in seventh heaven when she visits the expansive university botany department where Mrs. G (Judy Greer) works, when not substitute teaching at the nearby middle school. |
More’s the pity, because Mabel is a quiet charmer.
We meet 11-year-old Callie (Lexi Perkel) as she carefully digs up a touch-sensitive Mimosa pudica fern in the forest near her Virginia home, and transplants it into a pot. She names it Mabel.
It’s a keepsake; her father, David (Quincy Dunn-Baker), has obtained a job in upstate New York, and this is moving day. The family — including mom Angela (Christine Ko) and Callie’s infant sibling — is leaving her beloved woodsy environment for the realm of strip malls and treeless suburban neighborhoods.
Callie’s bliss is botany. As the drive proceeds, looking out the rear seat window, she initially calls out the species of each passing clump of trees ... and then, a bit later, glumly recites the name of each big box store and its huge paved parking lot.
Callie’s early days in her new school are painful. She’s socially awkward and slightly withdrawn; fleeting efforts to fit in prompt only silent stares in an environment of established social cliques and lab partners. She’s also dismayed by the apathy shown by her sixth-grade science classmates, who seem to have no feeling for her style of intensely focused study.
On another note, Callie’s arrival delights next-door neighbor Agnes (Lena Josephine Marano), who similarly seems not to have any friends ... possibly because she comes on a bit strong. But the problem is that Agnes is “only” a lowly fourth-grader, and therefore beneath Callie’s notice.
Which, Angela quickly points out, is unkind.
Callie’s mostly unhappy school experience shifts when she spots a new substitute teacher pushing a cart laden with plants. Callie follows, winding up in an eighth-grade botany class taught by Mrs. G (Judy Greer).
Her teaching style is challenging and aggressive. She demands her students’ respect and attention, confounding them with all manner of plant lore. That makes Mrs. G awesome, in Callie’s eyes: everything she hopes to become. That she shouldn’t be “moonlighting” in an eighth-grade class is immaterial, and Mrs. G certainly doesn’t suspect anything, given that Callie is so quick to participate.
