Hannah Montana: The Movie Is Very Silly and Also Not Terribly Realistic
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This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Alternately, y’all can emulate Todd in the Shadows. I had the pleasure of writing about a whole slew of less than transcendent Madonna movies for him—Shanghai Surprise, Who’s That Girl, The Next Best Thing and Dick Tracy–and now I am writing about another pop diva who never quite figured out the whole “movies” things either: Miley Cyrus.
When I first saw Hannah Montana: The Movie all the way back in 2009 when I reviewed it during its theatrical release, I knew nothing about Cyrus except that Hannah Montana, her Disney Channel sitcom alter-ego, was nothing short of a pop culture phenomenon.
I vaguely remember watching five minutes of Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel randomly and being gob-smacked at its awfulness. I wasn’t expecting anything droll or sophisticated but I wasn’t expecting Hee Haw or Mama’s Family either and that’s exactly what I got.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, if a sitcom has an episode where a character has to be at two places at the same time and needs to switch between costumes and identities to keep the charade going, it’s safe to assume that it’s tacky as fuck. That’s the entire premise of Hannah Montana so it’s corny on a level beyond self-awareness and self-parody.
Hannah Montana the movie and the TV show help explain Cyrus’ subsequent mutations of music and image. Cyrus didn’t just go from G to PG or PG-13. She went from G to X, from clad conservatively enough for Christians in the South to pretty much buck-naked all the time.
Cyrus had to turn herself into a X rated cartoon of stoned, polyamorous debauchery in order to kill the plastic monster of Hannah Montana. She had to reclaim her identity as an artist and a woman by doing things designed to both horrify and titillate her former bosses at Disney.
Cyrus went from being a G-rated cartoon to an X-rated cartoon without losing her fundamental cartoonishness, that wacky, rubbery sense of physicality. Whether executing pratfalls and mistaken-identity hijinks for Christian tweens or simulating the act of love-making with Robin Thicke onstage at the VMAs, Miley never stopped making money off silly faces.
Cyrus makes a whole lot of faces in Hannah Montana: The Movie. She was a consummate pro despite being a teenager but she’d also clearly moved on in her mind when the modestly budgeted adaptation of the Disney Channel hit show grossed nearly 170 million dollars at the worldwide box-office and a fortune more on home video.
Cyrus dutifully goes through the motions here, a plastic smile plastered on her face as she hammily inhabits two very different personas, neither of whom seemed to have much to do with the real Cyrus at that point in her life and career.
It wouldn’t be long until Cyrus would loudly declare her independence and introduce a provocative new image the way privileged young white people often do: by smoking marijuana and becoming involved with black music.
Later her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, would declare his own independence and introduce a new image for himself the way middle-aged white men often do: by smoking (and selling) marijuana and getting involved with black music, in his case with Lil Nas X and the monster hit “Old Town Road.”
When you devote your youth to the creation of something like the television and movie version of Hannah Montana, you feel the need to atone for your creative sins. You want to create something real and true and personal to make up for the insultingly manufactured nature of literally everything you did as a teenager.
But before Miley could kill Hannah she had to resurrect her on the big screen a second time in just two years following the extraordinary success of the 2008 3-D concert film Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, which grossed over seventy million dollars, in 2009’s Hannah Montana: The Movie, a trash culture experience that has aged about as well as Miley’s “Hamster Dance” ringtone.
When it came time to adapt Hannah Montana for the big screen as a narrative motion picture, Director Peter Chelsom was obviously not particularly concerned with opening up the story and making the TV-sized world of Hannah Montana cinematic. He was content to turn a stupid, tacky television sitcom into a stupid, tacky cinematic sitcom.
In Hannah Montana: The Movie, Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) is doing a pretty bang up job of holding it all together despite the inhuman pressure of having to live two lives.
In her everyday life, Miley is a typical, everyday high school student. But at night Miley puts on a blonde wig and transforms into bubblegum pop star Hannah Montana for concerts and press engagements without the public knowing that Miley and Hannah are the same people because everyone is apparently afflicted with the same disease that keeps the people of Metropolis from noticing that Clark Kent looks just like Superman with glasses.
But when Miley commits the unforgivable crime of being late to best friend Lilly’s (Emily Osment) 16th birthday party, something Lilly and the film treat as an unspeakable transgression with the power to end their friendship, and gets into a cat-fight with Tyra Banks over a pair of expensive shoes, her daddy Robby Ray (Billy Ray Cyrus) decides that he’s had enough.
Miley has made a few minor mistakes so it’s time to resort to the nuclear option: lying to the overworked teenager and sabotaging her professionally for her own good.
To get his daughter into the right place, geographically and emotionally, to learn life lessons, Robby Ray resorts to tactics more suitable to extricating a loved one from a deadly cult than teaching a headstrong young woman about the dangers of gittin’ above your raisin’.
Miley scores a plum gig filling in for Beyonce at a big awards show but instead of flying Miley to an important professional obligation Robby Ray has their private plane flown to their home town of Crowley Corners, Tennessee for the birthday party of grandmother Ruby (character actress Margo Martindale).
Robby lies to his daughter. He causes her to miss a huge professional opportunity we learn nearly got Vita (Vanessa Williams, a show-business lifer who knows something about paying a price for being too sexual as a young woman, having been stripped of her Miss America crowd once nude pictures of her came out), her hard-charging publicist fired. He tricks her into spending two solid weeks in a place she does not want to be, being forced to bond with people she’d rather avoid. That is straight up villainous. He should lose custody for those kinds of weird mind games. Instead he’s posited as a down-home hero who is pushed to extremes by his daughter’s high falutin’, city-slicking ways and shameful desire to live up to her professional responsibilities.
Miley is such a city slicker, in fact, that she doesn’t even recognize her own horse. This leads to one of many scenes where the simple country folk of Crowley Corners dress Miley down for getting all citified and we’re supposed to be all, “Yeah! Fuck her for paying attention to her thriving career as an international pop superstar! She should be cleaning stables and falling in horse poop so she doesn’t forget where she came from!”
Mama Ruby says it best, when she implores folksily, “We’re britches and boots and if that ain’t good enough for you, maybe you should just pack up and git!”
But when Miley strikes up a flirtation with Travis Brody (Lucas Till), a hunky cowboy with bedroom eyes, her desire to pack up and git evaporates. As blandly played by Till, Travis has two defining characteristics: he’s a country-western wet dream of macho male perfection and he’s so mind-bogglingly stupid that he never figures out that Miley looks EXACTLY like Hannah Montana minus a blonde wig and short skirts. He’s less simple in a Marlboro Man/Harlequin romance kind of way than simple the way Lennie in Of Mice and Men was simple.
Miley makes a romantic date with Travis on the EXACT same night Hannah Montana is supposed to be the guest of honor at the mayor’s fancy dinner. What’s a girl to do?
In a scenario I imagine finds its way into a distressingly vast number of Hannah Montana episodes, Miley must frantically juggle her two lives and identities by racing back and forth between the romantic date and the fancy dinner.
Look closely and you can see the light in Cyrus’ eyes die as she contemplates a future filled with decades upon decades of scenes like the one she finds herself trapped in. No wonder she had to kill the image Disney had created for in order to find herself creatively: it would be impossible to sustain as an adult who looked out for her own interests, and not the interest of the Walt Disney corporation and its shareholders. Just watching her in Hannah Montana: The Movie was killing me and driving me insane. I can only imagine how humiliating, on a soul-deep level, it must be to actually have to use your art and your voice and your body to breathe life into these kinds of hackneyed shenanigans.
Hannah Montana: The Movie offers a rich tapestry of inane subplots, from a British tabloids’ frantic efforts to learn Hannah Montana’s secret identity to a romantic subplot for Robby Ray involving daddy finding a second chance at love following the death of his late wife and Miley’s mother. My favorite of the many inane subplots is one seemingly borrowed from 1980s breakdancing exploitation movies. Mr. Bradley (Barry Bostwick), a sinister real estate developer, is out to ruin the charming small town by building a giant shopping mall in its heart.
The only way they can possibly raise enough money to save the town from Mr. Bradley is with a big charity concert by the world-famous Hannah Montana during which Hannah, unwilling to go on living a lie when surrounded by so many honest, good-hearted, dumb as dirt country folks, takes off her wig and reveals her secret identity as modest country girl Miley.
In a sequence bizarrely redolent of the climax of Loqueesha, the town of Crowley Corners—the whole damn town pretty much–tells her she MUST continue to perform as Hannah Montana because the world NEEDS her and the magic of her blandly appealing brand of middle-of-the-road pop-rock.
In a development that cornily reflects the film’s themes, small town decency and Southern neighborliness triumph over the tacky sensationalism of tabloids and the emptiness of Hollywood glitz when even a sleazy British tabloid ghoul chooses to keep Miley’s secret rather than lose face in front of his daughters, both of whom are Hannah Montana super-fans.
Like the “hero” of Loqueesha, who is so beloved that even after his own double life is exposed he gets to continue performing as Loqueesha as well as himself, Miley gets to go on living the perfect double life as a down-home girl-next-door who also has Beyonce on speed dial.
Hannah Montana: The Movie is a fizzy, dizzy, fascinating time capsule of a particularly weird era in tween entertainment. It’s incredibly stupid and pandering but also a lot of dumb fun if you’re in the right frame of mind and you don’t mind laughing at a broad, lowbrow comedy rather than with it.
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