Booksmart

 Actually, I felt the same way when I reread Postcards from the Edge right after Carrie Fisher died. The first time I read it, I was twelve and didn’t really get it. But when I read it again as an adult, I realized, “Carrie Fisher really was a very good writer.” I’ve always liked Fisher because 1) Everybody loves Princess Leia and 2) She was so open about having bipolar disorder which I also have. But when I reread Postcards from the Edge, I truly appreciated her talent for the first time. (I also decided to cut back on my espresso intake immediately.)

Even if I had not known Lourd was Fisher’s daughter, I would have loved her performance in this film. Her character is just the best. I love Gigi’s manic energy, and the screwball humor of her seeming omnipresence. She plays this all just perfectly.  (Sometimes, she’s eerily like her mother, perhaps self-consciously so.)

The rest of the movie is good, too. The plot is actually pretty easy for me to identify with because like Beanie Feldstein’s Molly, back in high school, I was the valedictorian who didn’t go to parties. I must say, though, my own motivations were quite different from Molly’s.

I’m sure I would have gone to more parties if I hadn’t gone to three high schools. I have good memories from the first and the last of these and think of both of them as my high school. If pressed, I probably identify with the last school the most, but I felt far more human at the first. I became valedictorian not because I was on some ruthless quest for world domination but because of a combination of OCD, terror, and a desire to be left alone. (If you do what’s asked, they leave you alone. Then you can do whatever you want.) I also genuinely enjoy learning, which is not often an attribute of the extremely cool. (Well, I think it’s cool, but you know…)

On paper, I was quite similar to Molly, but our motivations were so different. I definitely didn’t regard my classmates with superior disdain. As my husband and I discussed after the film, though, we see that Molly’s classmates appear to be significantly wealthier than she is.  Surely her self-proclaimed superiority is a self-preserving defense mechanism.  Her harsh judgments about all of her classmates give us an idea of the unrelenting standards to which she holds herself.  I was just incredibly shy, wary of attachments (because I was always moving every ten seconds), and vaguely aware that my mental health was precarious. (I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want anyone to find out.) Also my parents were a bit overprotective.

Now college was a different story.  I definitely had far more thrilling misadventures (if you’d characterize the painful process of discovering that I’m Bipolar I (heavy on the mania) as a thrilling misadventure).  For sure, I did more stuff (though I was never banned from Jamba Juice).  (I don’t know if I’m saying that with intact pride or faint regret.)

But I mean, these girls are definitely enough like me to hold my interest. (I love that they use their fake IDs for studying at the college library. It makes me remember the devious and desperate methods by which my college classmates would “borrow” books from another university’s library and the time my friend somehow convinced a total stranger to let me use his library card. It only took her five minutes, but her subsequent efforts to seduce him continued for months to everyone’s entertainment but his.)

Making Molly’s best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) a lesbian is a great choice that serves the story well. Amy’s parents (gamely played by Will Forte and Lisa Kudrow) may not be able to understand that Molly and Amy are platonic best friends, but I think most kids in high school now will totally get that. (It’s only been twenty years since I was in school, but I remember multiple instances of people coming out and then being shunned by various straight friends.  Obviously, many people continued to behave normally as loyal friends, but there was definitely a popular misconception that a gay person automatically had sexual designs on everybody of his or her own gender. That’s so weird to recall, but it was so frequently reinforced by pop culture of the time. Kids today seem to have a much more nuanced understanding of how human relationships work.)

These tweaks to the characters and their motivations ensure that this isn’t just a straight up remake of Superbad. In fact, the movie isn’t really all that much like Superbad at all. Possibly it’s being marketed that way to generate greater interest. I mean, two high school best friends with something to prove try to get to a party and have a series of misadventures. And then they have to graduate and go off on separate paths. But (aside from one moment that eerily echoes something that happens to Michael Cera’s character), the similarities basically end there.

That’s one thing that really works in the movie’s favor. It isn’t trying to be a point-by-point, scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot gender-flipped remake of Superbad. The characters aren’t just girls who do exactly what the boys did. They are their own unique individuals whose journeys are shaped by their own personalities and desires. And Dever and Feldstein have great chemistry. Their friendship is sweet and seems real, and watching them grow together (and apart) is charming and touching.

The rest of the cast is great, too. Honestly, I’d love to go to that school. The whole class seems delightful. They’re all so kooky and awesome. (And they’re all getting into Ivy Leagues! How do I get my kids into this high school?)

I think I loved every single performance in this film (which is rare). The entire supporting cast lights up the screen. The casting director needs a raise! The characters they play are all so much fun.  I especially love the two drama guys (Austin Crute and Noah Galvin) who made me laugh even in the early part of the movie before the comedy kicked into high gear.  (Their summer project sounds so awesome!)  Also especially good are classmates played by Molly Gordon (who had a much more boring role in Life of the Party), Diana Silvers (whose face has become incredibly familiar to me from the Ma trailer), Eduardo Franco, and Nico Hiraga.  (In fairness, Vanessa Ruesga and Mason Gooding are probably good, too.  I just don’t like their characters.)  Skyler Gisondo is as good as I had hoped, and (as I think I might have mentioned), Billie Lourd is amazing.

The adults in supporting roles are so hilarious, too.  I love the way Miss Fine’s story develops.  (I wasn’t really familiar with Jessica Williams, but she’s great in this.)  Mike O’Brien also has a bit that’s far better than anything I ever saw him do on SNL, and Jason Sudeikis probably has the best role of any adult (playing an adult) in the movie.  (Given his relationship with the director, that’s hardly surprising.)  He’s incredibly funny.  Also, though I didn’t notice until the end credits, Maya Rudolph plays the motivational voice.

Best Scene:

That bit on the boat is when I realized I loved this movie.  If I were Amy or Molly, I definitely would have stayed at that first party.  That was clearly the best party.  It had the most to offer–friendly people who were glad to see them, unlimited resources at their disposal, a space that was quiet, grand, unpredictable, and safe (barring some medical complication).

I also really loved the very last lines of the movie because tapping into that feeling was so easy.  I think we’ve all been there at some point.

Best Scene Visually:

The part with the dolls is very trippy (because that’s the whole point).  I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not, but it is memorable.

The scene in the pool is equally conspicuous.  At first I wasn’t sure if I liked that either because it seemed so different from the rest of the film.  For a moment, I thought, “This is almost pretentious.”  Then I told myself, “Yeah, but it’s working.”  

By the time we had returned to the kitchen, I decided that I loved the sequence (if you include the indoor portion as part of the same sequence).  So many (familiar) emotions, conveyed entirely non-verbally in such a short time!  It’s like the entire experience of adolescence and young adulthood in miniature.  It’s the essence of a party.

Best Action Sequence:

Does that masked demand for information count as an action sequence?  At first I thought that scene was over-the-top, but I loved where it went, especially because the callback later is not only hilarious (in a random way) but actually relevant to the plot.  In a weird way, it’s a teachable moment for young women.

Funniest Scene:

Well, Billie Lourd steals the entire movie for me, but the Uber scene with the unexpected driver is also pretty great, so hilariously uncomfortable.

I also found the girls’ ongoing conversations about the panda increasingly charming.  They have fantastic chemistry here, and you really believe they are friends.  In fact, during the initial reveal, Beanie Feldstein just sparkles.  You watch and think, “I’ll bet this girl is so delightful in real life.”  She’s definitely versatile.  Her character here is very different from Julie in Ladybird.

The Negatives:

Booksmart is great, but its first fifteen minutes or so are not actually very funny.  They offer occasional laughs and smiles (and some moments of realistic pain), but as the movie started, I found myself thinking, “Okay, as it turns out, this is more a movie where you smile and wish it well even though you’re hardly laughing.  The characters are likable enough.  The friends have good chemistry and seem sweet, so at least this will be cute.”  And then suddenly the film becomes laugh-out-loud hilarious.  (If pressed for a time stamp, I would say the actual laughs begin the moment a cake is hurled off the side of a mountain.)

Speaking of hurling (though of a different sort), Amy’s disastrous moment of intimacy at the party echoes Michael Cera’s experience in Superbad perhaps more strongly than anything else in the movie.  But I find the Michael Cera version of this scene much funnier.  I think that scene worked better in general.  I do love the idea of Amy’s awkwardness (though it’s taken to quite an extreme).  It’s also funny to think about how our society has changed.  This isn’t a 1980s teen movie.  We’re definitely in a different era.  These days, it’s not at all surprising for a person to come out publicly years before having any kind of sexual experience.  People spend a lot of time thinking and talking openly about both sexuality and gender now.  More information is available.  More conversations are happening.  Unhelpful reactions and stigma have not disappeared, but they have lessened considerably.  So I find this scene intellectually interesting and also good as drama, but it’s not exactly funny.  I think the Michael Cera scene just worked better as comedy.

Booksmart is definitely not what you’d call strictly realistic.  But despite its zaniness and comic exaggeration, it does manage to convey emotional truth multiple times.  

If you’re offended by profanity or frank discussions of sex (and sexuality), you won’t like it.  The R rating and comparisons to Superbad should make clear what you’re in for. As R-rated teen comedies go, there’s very minimal nudity (maybe none), but frank discussion of sexual topics is omnipresent, and there is definitely drug use, so this is probably not the movie to see with your eighty-year-old mother (unless she finds that kind of thing funny.  When I’m eighty, I’ll like it.  But maybe your mother thinks you’re too much of a stick in the mud to enjoy it.  I guess the point is, know your mother).  For some reason, the characters do say the word vagina a lot.  I mean, I’m all for vaginas, but I don’t remember my friends routinely using the word ten times in one sentence.  (I remember thinking, “I guess kids just say vagina a lot now.”  Then I thought, “Our sixteen-year-old son hardly ever says it.”  But obviously, he wouldn’t say to us, “Hey Mom and Dad, guess what?  Vagina vagina vagina vagina!”)  I feel like those girls need to learn some other words, though, not even necessarily crude ones.  I really think Amy would benefit from a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. (I mean the book, but watching a few episodes of the show would probably help her out, too.)  

Overall:

Billie Lourd is amazing in Booksmart.  Her performance alone is worth the price of admission.  The rest of the movie is hilarious, too (except maybe the first fifteen minutes or so).  This movie exceeded my expectations and made me (and the rest of the audience) laugh out loud multiple times.  I’m definitely going to buy it.  I don’t know if you’ll laugh out loud, but I’m still smiling.