Booksmart
Directed by: Olivia Wilde
Written by: Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Katie Silberman
Starring: Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever, Skyler Gisondo, Billie Lourde, Diana Silvers, Jason Sudeikis, Noah Galvin, Mason Gooding, Mike O'Brien, Austin Crute, Eduardo Franco, Molly Gordon, Nico Hiraga, Jessica Williams, Victoria Ruesga, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte
Comedy - 102 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 May 2019
Written by: Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Katie Silberman
Starring: Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever, Skyler Gisondo, Billie Lourde, Diana Silvers, Jason Sudeikis, Noah Galvin, Mason Gooding, Mike O'Brien, Austin Crute, Eduardo Franco, Molly Gordon, Nico Hiraga, Jessica Williams, Victoria Ruesga, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte
Comedy - 102 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 May 2019
I’m happy Hollywood keeps remaking American Graffiti for graduating seniors. It has become akin to a rite of passage as to what movie will represent your graduating class. My senior class had Can’t Hardly Wait. The year after me was American Pie. Last year was Blockers. 2019 seniors are lucky to receive Booksmart by way of first time feature film director Olivia Wilde. Booksmart revolves around the tried and true concept of anything and everything will happen over the course of one night. It aims for Superbad raunch, but this teen sex comedy flips the gender with two girls attempting to make up for four years of studying, rather than partying, in one night. Blockers offered the twist of three girls making a pact to lose their virginity on prom night, but Booksmart is wiser and more realistic than that baser film; well, as realistic as a gross-out fest can be.
Molly (Beanie Feldstein, Lady Bird) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever, Detroit) made a choice entering high school to forgo social status and good times to ensure they each wound up in the Ivy League at the end with bright futures. Success. Molly is off to Yale, Amy is off to Columbia, but something is wrong. Their classmates, upon whom class president Molly condescends to and mocks for their futures in fast food, are also all off to prestigious universities and successful lives. But, they also partied. It’s not fair! Marking themselves as lunch room pariahs and acting far older than their true teenage selves, Molly feels they deserve accolades at the expense of her more carefree peers. Now, the duo has one night, the night before graduation, to squeeze in four years of debauchery.
Molly (Beanie Feldstein, Lady Bird) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever, Detroit) made a choice entering high school to forgo social status and good times to ensure they each wound up in the Ivy League at the end with bright futures. Success. Molly is off to Yale, Amy is off to Columbia, but something is wrong. Their classmates, upon whom class president Molly condescends to and mocks for their futures in fast food, are also all off to prestigious universities and successful lives. But, they also partied. It’s not fair! Marking themselves as lunch room pariahs and acting far older than their true teenage selves, Molly feels they deserve accolades at the expense of her more carefree peers. Now, the duo has one night, the night before graduation, to squeeze in four years of debauchery.
Yet, the two are too strait-laced to let it all go at once. Amy drives them around town in her Volvo station wagon with bumper stickers which tell us more than any dialogue could. There is Elizabeth Warren 2020, Resist, you get it. After graduation, she is off to Botswana to help poor women make their own tampons. Booksmart has its fair share of one-dimensional characters to help define who is who, but Amy’s homosexuality is not her unique characteristic - the film is so casual about it that it could be no other way. But just because Amy is confident with herself and being ‘out’ amongst her family and schoolmates, it doesn’t mean she isn’t still shy and petrified to talk to her crush. Both Amy and Molly have a goal to talk to their secret paramours tonight, but it’s the straight Molly whose quest is the surprise, not lesbian Amy.
Molly is in love with Nick (Mason Gooding), the school’s goofball Vice President perpetually surrounded by the supermodel clique and the butt of Molly’s jokes about being a loser for the last four years. A more standard teen comedy would make Amy and Molly’s crush quest the central arc - a 'will they or won’t they before dawn' scenario. But Booksmart is…too smart for such a shallow gimmick. The girls’s friendship is center stage and rides the crests and troughs over the situation comedy the girls keep finding themselves in, like when they believe they’ve inhaled a pound of cocaine, or really are drugged and hallucinate they are Barbie dolls, or discover the school principal (Jason Sudeikis, The Angry Birds Movie) is a Lyft driver on the side.
Fair or not, Booksmart will be tagged as the female Superbad. It’s more than Beanie Feldstein being Jonah Hill's real life sister, the films feel similar, and both are strengthened by those one-dimensional supporting characters. Booksmart has the drama nerd who must pronounce his semester abroad as “Bar-thel-ona” and the rich kid who believes he must purchase friendship drives around with license plates which say “FUK BOI”. These are stereotypes, but by the end, nobody is left too much as a complete caricature. Keeping the pace fresh even as some ridiculous episodes fall flatter than others, Wilde transitions each scene with popular, vulgar hip-hip and pop tunes Molly and Amy most likely would not be familiar with and Dan the Automator laces it all with a groovy score.
Only high schoolers believe one night will alter your entire life or make up for years of absence in the span of a few hours, and that’s what makes them watchable. We all mature, enter the workforce, get married, and have children, but there will always be a new batch of high school seniors ready to tear their clothes off and figure it all out during one night of bacchanalia. Molly and Amy are not encountering their coming-of-age story, they are already passed that, they chose to study through it. They must consciously de-mature and mentally make themselves younger to get through the night. They are not out to shed their virginities; perhaps in a film first, these girls are wise enough to recognize sexual conquest and/or a file folder of miscellaneous bedroom experiences do not define their identities. This is why Booksmart rises above its genre peers and represent this year’s seniors very well.
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