Olivia Wilde (2019)
A caveat … There’s a lot of dialogue in the comedy Booksmart, much of it spoken at speed. My ears didn’t adjust as they usually do to what I was meant to be hearing; I missed plenty of words and may have misunderstood some important elements of Olivia Wilde’s debut feature. The premise is clear enough, though. Hard-working, academically successful students Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) have grown up together in San Fernando, California, and been best friends for years. Amy is going to Botswana for the summer – teaching local women to make their own tampons, she says – before taking up a place at Columbia. Molly has got into Yale. On the eve of high school graduation, the pair realise that concentrating on good grades has deprived them of all the extracurricular fun their contemporaries have been having. Amy and Molly embark on desperate last-minute attempts to compensate.
Everyone in the girls’ class is sworn to secrecy as to their higher education or job destination – in order not to hurt each other’s feelings. This is presumably class president Molly’s idea and ignored by everyone who despises her all-work-and-no-play philosophy – so that only she and Amy are still in the dark about what their classmates are doing next. Even the high school principal (Jason Sudeikis) makes clear in an early conversation with Molly that he finds the don’t-tell policy tedious. In the school toilets, she receives shocking news from three other students, the notoriously promiscuous Annabelle (Molly Gordon) and two boys, one of whom is off to Stanford, the other to a six-figure-salary job with Google. Like Molly, Annabelle – aka ‘Triple A’ – is headed for Yale. ‘I’m incredible at handjobs, but I got a 1560 on the SATs,’ she explains. Molly is horrified and incredulous: ‘But you guys don’t even care about school!’ Annabelle corrects her: ‘No, we just don’t only care about school’.
Although that’s the key (audible) line of Booksmart, its implications aren’t clear cut. Are Amy and Molly isolated from the other students because they’re swots or because they’re more generally serious-minded? They decide to crash a succession of graduation eve parties. At one of these, someone expresses surprise the duo isn’t otherwise engaged in ‘some kind of boring demonstration’. But there’s no evidence, beyond the stated purpose of Amy’s trip to Africa, that they translate into action the right-on surface of their lives – the pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Molly’s bedroom wall, the ‘Warren 2020’ sticker on Amy’s car. This may, of course, be down to the story’s short timeframe but the screenplay (by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman) is slippery about just what kind of killjoys Molly and Amy are. As a result, Olivia Wilde tars with the same brush nerdiness and humanitarian aspiration.
Compared with another recent schoolgirl coming-of-age story, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, this film is opaque about the protagonists’ financial circumstances. Even so, Booksmart gives the impression that Molly, at least, is also different from her peers because her background is less privileged. Her parents are conspicuous by their absence but their daughter is unusual in not already having her own car. Further up the economic scale, it’s somewhat refreshing that the girls’ super-rich classmate Jared (Skyler Gisondo) emerges not as a spoiled brat but as kind-hearted – and lonely because the other students assume he’s a spoiled brat: except for his druggy friend Gigi (Billie Lourd), the heroines are the only arrivals at his graduation party, on a yacht. Later, all the main characters, including Jared, end up at another party at an enormous house with a swimming pool – which somewhat blurs the standard-of-living distinctions between the better off kids.
The host of the latter party is Nick (Mason Gooding, Cuba Gooding Jr’s son), the class vice-president. Nick’s popular with all his classmates (how come he didn’t get elected president?) and Molly has a crush on him. Amy came out as lesbian in tenth grade but hasn’t yet had a relationship, though she’d like one with Ryan (Victoria Ruesga). The two (stereotyped) leading lights of the school drama society are differently camp: waspish, bossy George (Noah Galvin) and glamorous, queenly Alan (Austin Crute), white and black respectively. The sexual and ethnic diversity of the students, though hardly unstressed, is enough to give Booksmart a contemporary feel. Yet what gives the two lead performances depth is the persisting suggestion – even though next to nothing is said to this effect – that personal insecurities drive Amy’s and Molly’s scholastic focus. Molly is overweight and dresses like someone twice her age. It may be personal shyness rather than disquiet about her orientation that’s held Amy back but she’s evidently found the step from announcing to realising her sexuality intimidating. Both girls assume that sex life will start after high school – in other words, at a point in the future.
Until Nick’s graduation party, that is. Things soon go wrong there for Amy when she sees Ryan making out with Nick but that’s not enough to discourage Molly. Insisting something ‘could really happen’ between her and Nick, she refuses to leave when Amy says they’ve done enough partying. This sparks a home-truths row between the two best friends, in which Amy says she’s fed up of being organised by Molly and announces she’s spending not just the summer but a whole gap year in Botswana. She then has a panic attack in a bathroom, where she’s found by classmate Hope (Diana Silvers), reputedly a bitch but not so now. The girls’ preparations for sex together are stopped in their tracks when Amy vomits over Hope. Molly gets no further with Nick than dancing with him for a few seconds. She leaves alone and is heading home on foot when Triple A stops and gives her a lift. Back at the party, police arrive to make a drugs raid. Amy surprises everyone (me included) by distracting police attention to allow everyone else to get away. She spends a night in the cells; by next morning, she’s the class heroine. I didn’t understand why Molly too was so rapturously received at the graduation ceremony. At this stage, tensions and animosities between the students have simply vanished without trace.
The film’s most successful combination of instant-impact joke and socio-economic comment concerns not one of the students but the principal, when it’s revealed he supplements his income driving for an Uber-type outfit. When Molly and Amy get a cab and find him at the wheel, Jason Sudeikis plays the principal’s embarrassment sensitively. In most other respects, though, Booksmart cuts down to size authority figures – adults generally – as in a traditional teen movie, though sometimes with a fashionable flavour. It’s not enough for the principal to need a second job; he also accidentally plays pornography through the speakers while Amy and Molly are in the back seat of his car. After escaping from the lavishly costumed murder mystery party that George is holding, the girls find out the address for Nick’s party from a pizza delivery man (Mike O’Brien), who then refuses to give them a lift there. The next morning, Molly sees an artist’s impression of a serial killer outside the police station where Amy is being held. The drawing looks just like the pizza man and Molly trades the information to get Amy out of jail.
Amy’s doting, embarrassing mother and father (Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) make an appearance only for an easy laugh or two. Their daughter’s decision to go partying thwarts their plans for a graduation-themed celebration supper for her at home. Her parents are so lovingly ready to accept Amy’s sexual orientation that they wrongly assume she and Molly are even more special friends than they actually are. The most striking treatment of a grown-up, however, is that of Miss Fine (Jessica Williams), a teacher who’s ‘always there’ for, and very popular with, her students – especially Theo (Eduardo Franco), the apparent dimwit who’s landed the Google job. He has a crush on Miss Fine and the two of them end up having a fling, which Olivia Wilde presents as cute and funny. It’s obviously unthinkable that she would have done so if the characters’ sexes had been reversed. By the same token, the Botswana tampons joke – an uncomfortable one in the moneyed context of the film, especially when none of the other students appears to have anything altruistic in mind – would rightly be deplored if the screenwriters were male.
But is Booksmart funny? I didn’t think so – perhaps because I missed some good lines, certainly because of unease about its ‘feminist’ double standards, also because of the prevailing acting style that Olivia Wilde has surely encouraged. All the young cast are more than competent. All, except for the two leads and Skyler Gisondo, seem to be doing a turn. This works well enough with characters like George and Alan, whose performance and personality seem virtually indivisible. In the case of, say, Hope or Theo, it comes across as shallow characterisation. This is the third time I’ve seen Kaitlyn Dever this year; I’m afraid I didn’t recognise her from the two other films (Beautiful Boy and The Front Runner) but she naturally makes a stronger impression as Amy. Beanie Feldstein, wonderful in Lady Bird, confirms here that she shares her brother Jonah Hill’s ability to move easily across a wide tonal range. Even so, I liked her best at the very start of Booksmart, in one of her simplest moments. Amy arrives to give Molly a lift to school. Molly dances her way out of the house to meet her friend. Beanie Feldstein’s movement has wonderful eccentric verve.
5 June 2019
