Wildflower, Matt Smukler's debut feature, follows Bea, a plainspoken teenager navigating life with neurodivergent parents. The film follows Bea's high-school drama, cheeky romance, and the struggles of her best friend and relatives. The film is inspired by Smukler's family and features a cast of distinctive characters. Kiernan Shipka leads an endearing cast in her animated portrayal of Bea, who lies comatose in a hospital bed, surrounded by worried family members. The film explores Bea's life from childhood to the recent past, narrated by her omniscient subconscious in VoiceOver. Bea's intra-family relations, resentments, and communication style are explored through flashbacks. Her feuding grandmothers Loretta and Peg, her neurotic aunt Joy, and her anxious husband Ben, are all involved in their bickering. Bea's parents, Sharon and Derek, are calm and collected, maintaining a steady faith that their daughter will wake up. Bea grew up hearing other adults describe her parents as "special," a euphemism for neurodivergent. Bea recounts how Sharon and Derek met, the rush of their marriage, and the thrill of her birth. However, everyone else, including Peg and Earl, struggle to trust their daughter to make her own decisions. Loretta, Derek's mother, harbors animus for Sharon's family but seems less fazed. There is an unacknowledged but suffocating assumption that the new parents simply can't do it. Wildflower is a film that reinterprets the experiences of disabled characters through the perspective of a child turned caretaker, Bea. The film follows Bea's journey from her early years in a mobile community to her senior year in Las Vegas, where she learns valuable lessons about her parents and their neurotypical lens.
Bea's early years are filled with adventure and freedom, but her exposure to life outside her immediate family leads to a decrease in her tolerance for Sharon and Derek. She reads their laid-back attitude as clumsy and finds their carefree approach frustrating. After a driving lesson goes wrong, Bea is sent to live with her aunt Joy and Ben, who teach her skills she missed out on but annoys her. Wildflower quickly moves on to Bea's senior year, where she hawks school raffle tickets with her best friend Mia, hoping to win a free trip to Disney. Her attitude changes, but she still has a renewed appreciation for her parents. The film gains momentum when it settles into Bea's recent past, chronicling her romance with Ethan, a fight with Mia, her guidance counselor's insistence on college application, and a petty feud with their high school's resident mean girl. The film highlights Bea's struggle to overcome her condescending relationship with her parents and everyone around her. When she starts to see them in the same light as the rest of the world, she overcompensates by turning herself into a caretaker, resurfacing childhood resentments and revealing hard-to-swallow truths. The film culminates in a tumultuous blow-up, but relationships are repaired, amends made, and Bea learns valuable lessons along the way.
