Bo Burnham (2018)
By the time of this year’s Directors Guild of America (DGA) ceremony, Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born had imploded as a major awards contender (except in the original song category). In a particularly striking illustration of this, Cooper, with nominations for the DGA’s top prize and their first-time feature award, lost out on both. Although he hadn’t been nominated for the former, it was Bo Burnham who won in the debut feature category for Eighth Grade. The DGA decision felt like a snub to Cooper as much as a commendation of Burnham but turns out not to be unfair. Eighth Grade, which he wrote as well as directed, is a good film.
Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) is a fourteen-year-old only child who lives with her single father Mark (Josh Hamilton) in suburban New York. She’s not exactly overweight but she’s dumpy; her pleasant rather than pretty face is studded with acne. About to complete her middle-school education and start high school, Kayla has no friends. In her room at home, she records motivational videos which she posts on YouTube. Their purpose, she tells her tiny number of followers, is to ‘help you guys’. In fact, these are self-help pieces in a very literal sense – Kayla’s way of trying to convince Kayla that, with application, she can fit in. Some hope: for this shy, self-doubting teenager, the videos’ objectives – how to be yourself, how to put yourself out there, how to be confident – are decidedly incompatible.
The videos are an effective narrative device: Burnham interposes them between episodes that dramatise Kayla’s worsening predicament. In a poll of the eighth graders to decide superlative students in various categories, she’s voted ‘Most Quiet’. She’s invited to a pool party, not by the birthday girl Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), one of Kayla’s most derisive classmates, but by Kennedy’s mother. The protagonist is a reluctant and desperately self-conscious guest; the party, sure enough, is a traumatic occasion. She then learns that Aiden (Luke Prael), a boy in her class whom she fancies, split up with his previous girlfriend when she refused to send him nude photos of herself. Kayla lies to Aiden that she has a ‘dirty photos’ folder on her phone, which gets him interested enough to ask if she does blowjobs. She says yes, researches oral-sex instructions online and is horrified: things go no further.
Her class spends a day shadowing twelfth-graders in preparation for their own progression to high school. Kayla’s twelfth-grade partner is Olivia (Emily Robinson), so encouraging and friendly that she invites Kayla to join her and her friends for the evening. One of the boys, Riley (Daniel Zolghadri), gives Kayla a lift home. He stops en route to start a game of truth or dare. This soon progresses to his taking off his top and instructing Kayla to do the same but she refuses. The exchange ends in tears and her deciding to give up making videos.
Eighth Grade has plenty of funny moments but a serious subject both timeless and contemporary: the urgent pressure to belong to a peer group, which social media culture has intensified. The requirements of conformity are manifold: you have to look the same, like the same things, speak exactly the same, limited language. Burnham’s description of a presumably typical present-day American secondary school is shocking not just in showing Kayla’s isolation and the pack (or safety-in-numbers) mentality that makes her life a misery. The heroine’s main conversation with Aiden takes place furtively, during a school safety training course – not a fire drill but an exercise in what to do if an armed gunman invades the classroom.
The truth-or-dare scene with Riley is troubling: you believe he means what he says when he insists he’s offering Kayla sexual experience for her own good, and that he may well be right when he warns she’s at risk of much rougher treatment elsewhere. Burnham does well also to make clear how Kayla herself can take out her frustrations on others, even if her options are relatively limited. Her very nice, slightly irritating, cluelessly accommodating father is his daughter’s whipping boy for much of the film. Gabe (Jake Ryan), Kennedy’s cousin whom Kayla meets at the pool party, makes follow-up contact with her online and her immediate reaction is to ignore him. Amiable, dorky, anal Gabe is the last thing Kayla needs if she means to be cool.
You wonder for some time (though this isn’t a long film: ninety-four minutes) how the story will be resolved. You know it will be false to the main character and the main theme to give Kayla a decisive breakthrough. Burnham manages the closing stages with integrity and skill. Kayla comes to appreciate her father. She accepts an invitation chez Gabe for a meal that he prepares; it goes quite well but without any suggestion that these are two misfits made for each other. After the middle-school graduation ceremony, during which she summons up the nerve to tell the gruesome Kennedy what she thinks of her, Kayla opens a time capsule that she put together in sixth grade. This includes a video in which her younger self asks Kayla questions about her current friendships and love life.
With her father’s help, she burns the time capsule before creating another to be interred in the back garden. For this, Kayla records a new message, urging her high-school self to keep going through hard times. A brief flash forward suggests that’s what Kayla does, acquiring, on the way, a little self-confidence in her demeanour – though without any remarkable transformation in her looks. This isn’t a dramatically exciting conclusion but it’s a psychologically persuasive one. It’s stylistically satisfying too, in sustaining video clips as integral to the story. A user review of the film that has stuck in my mind (though I don’t recall if it was on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes) complained that Kayla’s awkwardness was overdone to incredible effect. While it’s right that her looks and speech patterns are exaggerated to heighten the difference between her and the clones in her class, the emotional consequences of that difference feel truthful. The film struck me as more honest than another recent and interesting internet-generation drama-comedy, Matt Spicer‘s Ingrid Goes West (2017).
Bo Burnham, a comedian who started his performing career on YouTube and who is himself only twenty-eight, directs his predominantly young actors, all well cast, with a sure and sympathetic touch. Eighth Grade stands or falls on Elsie Fisher, who was only fourteen when the film was shot (in twenty-seven days) in the summer of 2017. Fisher was already a reasonably experienced screen actress at the time, although best known in cinema for her voice work (in the Despicable Me movies). She’s very likeable and remarkably honest as Kayla. For such a young teenager, this is a physically courageous, as well as an accomplished, performance. Josh Hamilton’s portrait of Mark is perfectly judged. Burnham pushes things a bit far in the sequence where, in order to keep an anxious eye on Kayla, Mark skulks in the mall where she’s meeting Olivia et al: this makes the father an actual embarrassment to Kayla rather than an anxiously imagined one. Later on, Mark, whose wife walked out when Kayla was a baby, tells his daughter what joy she’s always given him. The monologue is a shade overlong but that’s hardly a cause for complaint: Josh Hamilton delivers it beautifully.
1 May 2019
