When you are waiting for a baby, sometimes you go to the cinema and watch low-stress high-school flicks. I like high-school flicks. This is one of them.
Premise is that Emma Stone’s character pretends for various reasons to have sex with a variety of young men, and is vilified as a slut. The A of the title is a reference to The Scarlet Letter. It’s an interesting enough premise – anything that takes on the hypocrisy around teens having sex deserves props just for that.
Reviews I’ve seen have been giving this three stars. That’s about right. It’s well-executed and smarter than most stuff aimed at teens but it’s off-balance. It’s a bunch of good bits but there’s something about the assembly that doesn’t ring true.
Way I see it, this film is hamstrung by the very culture war it ostensibly takes on. It ends up playing nice and moral, even though it’s dealing with the failure of conservative morality. It doesn’t allow itself any teeth, and it has to fake its structure in order to rationalise its set-pieces.
Like, the core of the idea? That’s a meaty premise. Power in there, and some uneasy truths. But the film can’t own them and has to get its story going using a fakey-fakey imaginary high school social scene. It works like this: main character, brainy normal ignored Olive, lies to say she’s lost her virginity. What happens after this is that the entire school gossip ferociously about her, and she becomes an instantly notorious celebrity.
This is, needless to say, Not How It Works In Reals. This is fantasy-adult version of high school. Which is in itself fine, it just means we’re in symbolic high school movie not representative high school movie. However, look at the way those symbols get lined up: one sexual encounter = reputation for sexual promiscuity. This is the Family Values view of reality, embedded within and framing a story that tries to attack that same view of reality. The whole film is a contradiction in terms; it’s no wonder it doesn’t hold together.
That faultline goes right through the characters. Olive is a great character, mouthy and smart and creative and self-possessed. All the other high schoolers are bland, at best, or empty caricatures, at worst. The film keeps referencing John Hughes’ films, but for all their faults Hughes’ teens always had character. This film: no. How can they feel genuine when they have to exist as part of a fakey-fakey social world? Instead, the well-written character mojo runs through the adults, particularly Olive’s parents and her favourite teacher. In their chipper, smart dialogue (all the most fun sequences in the movie involve these adults) we can see that the main influence on this movie isn’t The Breakfast Club or Say Anything; it’s Juno. But that just cycles back to that key difference again. Juno added up to a coherent argument. This film can’t allow itself to do that.
So, I wanted more from this film. I do find the core premise fully engaging: a girl who recognizes that sexual experience is status currency, positive for men and negative for women, and then proceeds to upend status relationships in the male hierarchy while subverting the negative consequences that are put upon her. But this film only toys with these ideas, and never really engages with them. And sure, I wasn’t expecting a Show Me Love*-style dramatic exploration of how normative sexual culture operates among teens. But I wanted something that had more to say than this, something closer to The Breakfast Club, to Fast Times, to Superbad, even to American Pie.
Now, that’s a lot of paragraphs of negative. I feel like I need to redress the balance here: I liked this film a lot. It entertained me. Watch it on DVD if you like high school flicks. Enjoy Emma Stone’s great starmaking turn. Laugh at the genuinely funny stuff all the adults get to do. But don’t think too hard about it, in case you end up making long rambly blog posts. Like me.
* I prefer the alternate title for Show Me Love, but I try to avoid setting off the internet filters at people’s workplaces so I have not mentioned it.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Nancy Drew movie that Emma Roberts starred in. So you’re picking her to follow more after her aunt than her dad?
Nancy Drew was written & directed by Andrew Fleming, who previously made the cool teen horror movie The Craft, and the cool but odd political teen comedy Dick.
Oh, hold on. Emma Stone? Who’s that?
Superbad, Zombieland, female lead in the new Spider-Man
Oh good, it’s about time they remade Spider-Man. Those old movies will never engage with today’s kids.
There were female characters in Superbad?
Still haven’t seen Superbad. Must rectify.
Pearce: I’m gonna argue for the presence of good female characters in Superbad; just like in American Pie, they were minor characters in a story about guys. But they had a bit of wit and sensitivity to them.
Jon: yeah man, it’s a good watch.
Hm, maybe I should watch it again. The way I remember it, the girls in Superbad only existed to motivate the boys and stoke their egos.
Blake Edwards has died. No more Pink Panther movies, ever. 🙁
I have to agree with Pearce re: the girls in Superbad. I thought Superbad was a hoot, but the girls were excessively sexualised ciphers, to a degree I found creepy given they were meant to be high schoolers.
Naw, I’m still gonna stick with a defence of the Superbad girls (at least, the two main girls who are paired off with the boys at the end). Given that the story was not about them, and not told from their perspective at all, and it was about how the guys perspective is just wrong? There isn’t much space for them to become detailed 3D characters, or for the film to pass the Bechdel test. But I think they end up pretty close despite those constraints. The girl who gets drunk and wants to sex up Michael Cera gets props from me for knowing what she wants right from the start, having an agenda and pursuing it (clumsily) and generally having a mind of her own. The other girl is a bit more of a dream girl, but to my eye she’s not sexualised at all – which is part of the point, given Jonah Hill is constantly enacting sex talk. Jonah wants a girlfriend, not a f!ck. She also has her own agenda, and is totally self-possessed the whole time. She does totally fall into the Apatow pattern of hot girl making time with shlub guy w/ sense of humour, but that’s a separate deal. I reckon.
Sorry Morgue, you’ll never convince me on this one.
That Apatow “hot girl/schlub guy” thing happens largely because the male leads are cast for their sense of humour and his female leads are cast for their looks. They’re written that way too, so that even when genuine actresses are cast (e.g. Catherine Keener or Kristen Bell) they aren’t given anything terribly funny to do.
Some supporting female characters are allowed to be funny (e.g. Kristen Wiig, Charlyne Yi, Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann) but the female leads mostly just react to things the guys do.
Certainly there are is no female lead on the level of Lindsay Weir anywhere in Apatow’s filmography.