Four best girlfriends hatch a plan to stay connected with one another as their lives start off in different directions: they pass around a pair of secondhand jeans that fits each of their bodies perfectly.
Is there anything as exciting, especially as a tween or teen, as seeing one of your favourite books adapted for the silver screen? To a bookworm like me, it was extremely exciting. I followed with interest the marketing surrounding The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and read every magazine and listened to every interview I could find. When the film finally came out, my 12-year-old self wasn’t disappointed.
I’d fallen in love with Bridget, Carmen, Lena and Tibby, from Ann Brashares’ novel series, during a summer holiday spent going back and forth to the library. Eventually, I wore out my personal copies of the series to the point where they fell apart. Sisterhood felt a bit different. It was rooted in reality (apart from trousers that magically fit four very different girls and an inexplicably foolproof mail system), and it didn’t focus on romance. It explored difficult topics like mental and physical illness, death and grief, and family struggles, to name a few, and followed four very different characters. I loved all four of the girls and could see a bit of myself in each of them, whether it was a part of their personalities, their family life, their conflicts with others, or their struggles. Where older millennials were debating who was more of a Carrie or a Miranda, I was pondering if I was more of a Tibby or a Lena. Did I mention I was (still am) a dork?
As the title so aptly puts it, this story is about a pair of jeans and the sisterhood formed around them. These jeans have some kind of magic to them: found in a second-hand store before the quartet spend their first-ever summer apart, they fit the four girls despite their different figures. After drawing up some rules in a cutesy goodbye ceremony, they decide to mail the trousers every week to the next person in line. Shy artist Lena Kaligaris (Alexis Bledel) takes the first turn, flying off to spend the holiday with her grandparents in Greece; sporty and reckless Bridget Vreeland (Blake Lively), who’s enrolled in a football camp in Mexico for the season, is second in line; fiery Carmen Lowell is next, as she visits her father and his new blended family in another state; and, last but not least, is rebellious aspiring filmmaker Tibby Rollins (Amber Tamblyn), who’s staying home and working on a documentary while working at a local big-box store.
20 years later, one can say the main cast was an inspired set of choices by the production. Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia), Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls), and America Ferrera (Real Women Have Curves) were already established actresses before Sisterhood, while Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) was undeniably catapulted by it. They all nurtured successful careers following the film, as well, which is impressive: not all young ensemble casts can boast of cultivating similar success as they age out of the YA fare. Their performances may not be their personal best, but they remain earnest and sweet; you have no trouble believing their friendship, which has formed and lasted in real life since, as we learned when the actresses recently reunited on a red carpet following Ferrera’s celebrated performance in Barbie (2023).
Talking of, it’s quite fascinating to see Ferrera have a similar discourse to that Greta Gerwig-directed blockbuster. At the very start of the film, when she tries on the trousers for the first time, Carmen is convinced they’ll never fit her as well as they have fit her three skinny friends. She’s a curvy Latina, of course the trousers won’t even… oh, would you look at that? She bites back her words. Later on, she has the complete opposite experience while trying on a bridesmaid dress for her dad’s wedding: the dress is too small and revealing, and the comments from the seamstress and Carmen’s stepmother, saying alterations will be impossible and they’ll need to start from scratch, launches her into a passionate diatribe. Re-watching Sisterhood decades later makes it impossible not to see Ferrera’s equally passionate rant in the doll film, and feel like it was meant to be.
Found family is another topic at the heart of Sisterhood: through loss and grief, heartache and other growing pains, the four best friends are each other’s anchors. Their relatives may let them down, life may suck for various reasons, but at the end of the day, they have each other. They have a friendship that feels real, in a way that is not just sunshine and rainbows: they fight and argue, they call each other out, they unintentionally hurt each other, and they are vulnerable with each other. Some may find it sappy or cheesy, but it felt like just the right amount to me. I enjoyed, and cringed at, the Y2K fashions on display. Nostalgia is a big seller these days, and anyone yearning for an aughts-inspired style should add The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants to their watchlist for inspiration. The soundtrack was a similar throwback moment for me: I’ve always deeply connected with the music of films I love, and I found myself constantly surprised to recognise the songs being used in the film. I had forgotten that’s where I’d indubitably heard them for the first time (before adding them to my iPod Shuffle and playing them on loop).
Something else I had quite forgotten about is where my first love of films came from. I was inspired by Tibby and her filmmaking ambitions. Her character most definitely pushed me to consider films as more than just entertainment. Where I’d been an avid reader before that, I became equally interested in filmmaking and the art of cinema after reading Sisterhood, and the faded knowledge of that fact came rushing back to me upon my rewatch. There’s something truly special about remembering where a passion first flourished inside yourself and connecting with that version of yourself. As the girls say at the start of the film, everything is changing and “Nothing will ever be the same again,” and I felt it viscerally.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was a sensible box office success, almost doubling its $25M budget, and a sequel was subsequently greenlit and released in 2008. The original film found reasonable success among critics and audiences alike, although some bitter older critics (mostly men, what a surprise) did have to interject, saying how sappy and yucky they found it to be. Without naming any names, I’ll say I found it hilarious to read these reviews now. Oh, to be a middle-aged man looking down on overall earnest and wholesome, if only adequately entertaining, young adult content; that must be what being a true film connoisseur is.
All sarcasm aside, I’ll admit it’s not a must-watch for everyone. But, if you’re a fan of the novels, want to dig into some Y2K nostalgia, or are looking for a PG-rated watch with some nuance and depth for your tweens (or a new comfort watch for yourself, no judgement), then you’ll find something to like in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
USA | 2005 | 119 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • GREEK • SPANISH
director: Ken Kwapis.
writers: Delia Ephron & Elizabeth Chandler (based on the novel by Ann Brashares).
starring: Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel, Bradley Whitford, Nancy Travis, Rachel Ticotin & Jenna Boyd.
