Jason Sudeikis, comedic-everyman actor, has often been teased about dating screen goddess Olivia Wilde. One interviewer said words to the effect of: You know you’re “punching above your weight,” right? (Like, how does a guy who looks like you date a goddess who looks like her?)
Well, that goddess has now aced her directorial debut, with one of the funniest high school movies ever. And there’s your answer: Jason and Olivia are funny-people soulmates. Boo-yah. Good on ya, Jason. I wish I were you.
G.O.A.T.?
Is “Booksmart” the greatest high school movie of all time? The G.O.A.T., maybe? No, but it’s definitely in the top 20. Maybe the top 10. It’s heavily influenced by many of the greatest.It borrows its it-all-happened-during-one-night time frame from “American Graffiti” and “Dazed and Confused,” some soundtrack concepts from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and one of the lead characters is more than a little bit related to Cher from “Clueless.”
Also, Molly’s best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) is a Jennifer-Jason-Leigh-from-“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” lookalike, and that’s a whole sack full of high-school-movie tribute going on right there.
It starts off as a bit of a comeuppance tale; über-nerd class president Molly and her equally brilliant-geek bestie Amy are kind of mean girls (another high school movie) when it comes to lording it over less intelligent classmates.
They are brainiac nerd-geeks to the max. Modern high school movies have a new twist on nerd-dom: Nerds know their worth now, and it translates into a modicum of coolness. In the 1970s, you didn’t get nerds loudly and publicly flaunting their brain prowess and shaming jocks. In the ‘70s, nerds came in one package—the Napoleon Dynamite variety, and this variety got duct taped to lockers and wedgied profusely. Which probably still happens today, directly following any jock-shaming.
Anyway, during the time-honored high school scene of sitting on the toilet and hearing yourself get dissed, Molly, to her horror, discovers that all the cool kids she thought were her inferiors are just as smart, and one is actually going to the same Ivy League institution of higher learning that she is. Oops.
As you can imagine, this kicks off an existential crisis. Who are Molly and Amy if all their hard work and sacrifice doesn’t actually make them superior? What if all it made them was inferior, because all the other kids effortlessly aced college entrance exams while partying, skateboarding, scoring touchdowns, and binge drinking?
The situation needs to be remedied immediately. They can’t be the same as everyone else, except that they had no fun. They gotta party, man. And there’s only one night left to do it in!
And, by the way, this is the same scene that plays out with the VW bug-driving geek squad in “Dazed and Confused,” where Mike (Adam Goldberg) says, “What everybody in this car needs is some good ol' worthwhile visceral experience,” and they all resolve to screw up their courage and go to the cool kid’s party.
The difference in “Booksmart” is that the party is extremely elusive in terms of them locating its location. It’s a whole saga unto itself: Molly and Amy end up at a different party, on a yacht thrown by an even bigger loser than themselves. (There’s nobody there except his insane girlfriend.) They hail a Lyft, only to find their moonlighting principal driving it.
Furthermore, they try to stick up a pizza-delivery guy (who may or may not be an actual serial killer), and they get sneakily “dosed” by said insane girlfriend, a la Timothy Olyphant’s character dosing Emile Hirsch’s character with ecstasy in “The Girl Next Door” (another high school movie). Director Wilde played a high school party girl in that movie, by the way. So now that’s eight high school movie influences I count.
Will they find the party? Will they drink? Will they jump in the pool? Will they puke? Will they do sexual things? It’s rated R, so probably all of the above.
A Well-Defined Cast of Characters
It’s the outstanding side characters that make high school movies so fun, which is usually why the unknown actors in these movies tend to go on to have outstanding acting careers.Here, we’ve got the crew of characters who are flamboyant wannabe-in-showbiz kids: the über-dramatic, fur-wearing, insane-girlfriend rich girl (Billie Lourd), who pops up everywhere, and her unsinkable but lovable, tries-too-hard, party-on-a-yacht-throwing boyfriend, Jared (Skyler Gisondo).
And there are a couple of excellent teacher roles.
It’s 2019
This is definitely an update as to the current cultural goings-on of high school, which it shares with “Clueless” in the same way that that movie nailed its own particular time period.
As to whether it’s an upgrade, in terms of, you know, have high school kids evolved? Like, ethically? Like, morally? Questionable. Like, seriously questionable. Kids definitely know how to have more fun these days. But they’ve also got unlimited access to porn and drugs, as witnessed by the hilarious Lyft scene where the principal accidentally puts a porn scene that the girls are “researching,” on speakerphone.
The movie celebrates challenging heteronormality, and while that’s a current thing, it also celebrates some teacher/student consensual yet statutory rape. Are these a good thing? Don’t we have the moral equivalent of the boiling frog going on here? It’s funny, so … normalize it?
