Vada Sultenfuss is an 11-year-old girl living in Madison, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1972. Her father, Harry Sultenfuss, operates the town's funeral parlor, which is also their home. Her upbringing leads her to suffer from hypochondria and develop an obsession with death, which her father fails to understand. Also living with them are "Gramoo", Vada's paternal grandmother, whose recent dementia accentuates Vada's worries, and Harry's older brother Phil.
Vada hangs out with Thomas J. Sennett, an unpopular boy her age who is allergic to "everything". Other girls tease them, thinking they are more than just friends. Thomas J. often accompanies Vada when she visits the doctor, who assures her that she is not sick.
During the summer, Vada befriends Shelly DeVoto, the new makeup artist at the funeral parlor, who provides her with guidance. Vada has a crush on Mr. Bixler, her fifth-grade teacher, and hears about an adult poetry writing class he is teaching. Wondering how to pay for the class, she takes money from a cookie jar in Shelly's camper. During her first class, when suggested to write about what is in her soul, Vada fears that she killed her mother, who died two days after childbirth.
When Harry and Shelly start dating, Vada's attitude towards Shelly changes. One night, she follows them to a bingo game and brings Thomas J. along to disrupt it. On the Fourth of July, when Shelly's ex-husband Danny shows up, Vada hopes that Shelly will take him back, to no avail.
Following the holiday, Vada and Thomas J. knock down a beehive in the woods. Vada loses her mood ring in the process, and while they look for it, the bees swarm and force them to run away. Harry invites Vada to a carnival; she becomes distressed when he and Shelly announce their engagement there, leading her to contemplate running away.
Later, Vada screams when she believes that she is hemorrhaging. Shelly explains that she is experiencing her first period. As Vada accepts that this happens only to girls, she angrily rebuffs Thomas J. when he comes to visit. A couple of days later, Vada and Thomas J. sit under a willow tree, wondering what a first kiss feels like, so they share one. After Vada heads home, Thomas J. returns to the woods to search for her mood ring. Unaware that the beehive they knocked down is still active, he is killed by the bees due to his allergy.[3]
Harry delivers the tragic news to Vada, who stays in her bedroom for a full day. Shelly suggests that Harry console Vada, but he brushes her off. Shelly urges him to realize the significance of his daughter's pain. When Vada leaves her bedroom and sees Thomas J.'s body in his casket, she runs away out of grief to Mr. Bixler's house, wanting to stay with him, but flees after discovering that he is engaged.
Vada grieves by the willow tree where she and Thomas J. hung out. When she returns home, everyone is relieved, including Shelly, whom Vada begins to accept as her future stepmother. Her grief also mends the rift between her and her father, who assures Vada that her mother's death was not her fault.
Toward the end of summer, Vada and her father comfort Mrs. Sennett, who still struggles with her son's death. She returns Vada's mood ring, which Thomas J. had found. On the last day of her writing class, Vada reads a poem in memory of her best friend.
The screenplay, written by Laurice Elehwany, was originally titled Born Jaundiced, and was purchased by Imagine Entertainment in July 1990.[4] On August 24, 1990, it was reported in Daily Variety that the screenplay had been re-titled to I Am Woman, but was subsequently changed to its final title, My Girl, in the spring of 1991.[4] Elehwany based the fictional setting of Madison on the small towns in southwestern Pennsylvania where she grew up.[4]
Culkin and Chlumsky were cast in the lead roles of Thomas J. and Vada, respectively, in January 1991.[4] Filming took place in Bartow and Sanford, Florida beginning in February 1991.[4] Exteriors of the Sultenfuss home were supplied by a real Victorian home in Bartow, while the house's interiors were built on a soundstage in Orlando.[4]
When My Girl was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in September 1991, it was rated PG-13.[4] Later that month, the film's producers won an appeal to have the film reclassified to a PG rating.[4]
The film holds a 55% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 22 reviews. The site's consensus states: "My Girl has a mostly sweet story and a pair of appealing young leads, but it's largely undone by its aggressively tearjerking ending."[5]Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, writing: "The beauty in this film is in its directness. There are some obligatory scenes. But there are also some very original and touching ones. This is a movie that has its heart in the right place."[6]Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly praised Chlumsky's performance in the film, but conceded that "there’s something discomforting about a movie that takes the experience of an audacious, conflicted child and reduces it to: She needs to Confront Her Feelings. My Girl has some sweet, funny moments (the cast is uniformly appealing), yet it unfolds in a landscape of paralyzing, pop-psych banality."[7]
Film critic Caryn James cited the film as being part of a "trend toward stronger, more realistic themes in children's films", specifically its representations of death, specifically that of a young child.[8] David Kehr of the Chicago Tribune wrote of the film: "If My Girl helps stimulate family discussions of death and loss, it will certainly have done some good in the world. But at the same time, its aesthetic interest is virtually nil... Though My Girl seeks to stir large, devastating emotions, Zieff seems afraid to touch on anything too difficult or unpleasant, lest it alienate his audience. The results are curiously gutless and unmoving, as Zieff finds himself stuck with a sentimentality without substance, a poetry without pain."[9] Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times was similarly critical of the film's "syrupy" elements, concluding: "The mixture of winsomeness and deadpan frights in My Girl ought to be weirder and more interesting than it is. After all, a girl who survives a household where bodies are embalmed in the basement is the kind of plucky heroine that movies about kids need right now. Or movies about adults, for that matter."[10]
Janet Maslin of The New York Times was critical of the screenplay for being made up of "loose ends bound together only by intimations of mortality and family crisis," summarizing: "It's not hard for the maudlin My Girl to make its audience weepy at the sight of America's favorite kid in an open coffin. But it is difficult for this film to mix the sugary unreality of a television show with such a clumsy and manipulative morbid streak."[11]Variety noted: "Plenty of shrewd commercial calculation went into concocting the right sugar coating for this story of an 11-year-old girl's painful maturation, but [the] chemistry seems right."[12]
Box office
My Girl opened at No. 2 with $12,391,783, grossing $59,489,799 domestically,[1] and $62 million internationally[13] for a worldwide total of $121,489,799.
