Jailhouse to Milhouse (2024)

I had a minor resistance walking into Buddy Farmer’s Jailhouse to Milhouse.  So many documentaries about celebrities working through hard times to their career glory tend to be so flattering and clean that one can feel the lawyers in the room – for examples, witness the recent docs on Disney+ about Jim Henson and Stan Lee.  But this one is refreshingly honest and I was very moved.

Pamela Hayden’s legacy is cemented in history as the voice of Bart Simpsons nerdy buddy Milhouse on “The Simpsons” and the surprise is that the film focuses very little on her work on the show (the film’s entire content focusing on the show is in the trailer). 

Instead, Farmer spends much of the film focused on her early trauma as a troubled teenager who was so unmanageable in her depression that some adults figured she wouldn’t live to see 30.  She was put into a boarding school to help straighten her out, but it turned out to be little more than a detention house, and things went from bad to worse as she found herself in a juvenile jail.

The movie is told almost entirely by Hayden herself who admits that she admires her most famous character because of his willingness to get knocked down and keep getting back up again.  As we hear her talk, it is hard not to always hear Milhouse in her own voice.  The film is framed by her current task, talking to young girls who are in danger of being put through the same crucible that she did.

This is a very heartfelt film, not about The Simpsons but about a woman who refuses to give up.