AndrewBloom
7/10 4 years ago
[7.2/10] *Booksmart* isn’t for me, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. I don’t know what it’s like to be a teenager graduating from high school in 2019. I don’t know what it’s like to be in the midst of a best friendship between two young women. I don’t know what it’s like to be a teenage girl who’s out and fumbling through the extra difficulties that would add to the already fraught endeavor that is high school dating.
I know versions of these things. I graduated from high school. I had close teenage friendships. I had more than my share of bad attempts at romance at the time. But the best thing about *Booksmart* is the thing that makes it hard for me to latch onto -- it’s so specific to that time, to that type of friendship, and those types of challenges. Sure, there’s elements of its story that are universal, but Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut has the chutzpah to go all-in on a tale of two soon-to-graduate teenage girls, and lets the move be particular to that experience.
The film centers on Molly and Amy, a pair of smart kids who decide to make up for a high school career sans partying by seeking out one of the cool kids’ pre-graduation ragers before their pre-college lives are officially over. Molly is assertive and insistent, ready to take chances and desperate to wrangle some of the experiences she fears she missed out on for nothing. Amy is a little more diffident and retiring, but goes along with her friend. And throughout it all, the two of them have a lived-in dynamic that plays believably like a pair of girls who’ve spent every day of high school together.
Their hunt for the party being thrown by Molly’s not-so-secret crush, Nick, with any number of colorful personalities and unexpected obstacles met along the way, calls to mind similar coming-of-age flicks. *Superbad* (starring Beanie Feldstein’s brother, Jonah Hill) and *Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist* traffic in the same sort of tropes and beats. But Wilde and a quartet of writers personalize that experience for young women today, channeling the same sort of awkward reality, angry confessions and reunions, and cartoony misadventures but tailoring them to a different perspective.
That said, the movie does hit a lot of familiar notes. There’s some commendable “hidden depths” storytelling here: smiling popular kids have brighter futures than you’d think, crushes fade and unexpected alternatives emerge, and even the depths of Molly and Amy’s friendship has some unexplored corners. But if you’ve seen enough teen comedies/coming-of-age tales, you’ll recognize a lot of the places *Booksmart* goes and see more than a few of the twists coming, even if the context is different.
That’s not a big issue, but it makes it harder for the movie to surprise a jaded old grump like yours truly. The gags and side-characters -- the sort of element that livens up different films working from the same playbook -- didn’t elicit many laughs or fond recollections. That is as it should be, and I can only expect and hope that younger folks would have many more laughs of recognition and appreciation for the exaggerated shenanigans that Molly and Amy get into. It often ran broad or contrived or over-the-top for my tastes, but those are the breaks
*Booksmart* tends to do better when it's going for sentiment rather than for laughs. There’s a strong degree of truth when the film sheds its wakcier trappings and starts tackling the unsparingly realistic lump-taking of teenage romance, friendship, and the cusp of a big change in one’s young life. By the time Amy and Molly reach their final party, the movie modulates to fit the moment, and hits its real highlights, even if it rumbles through a few clichés in the process.
But beyond its focus, one of the things that sets the film apart from other high school adventurism on film is its visual style. Wilde often shoots *Booksmart* like a music video, taking full advantage of bright colors, slow motion, and the movie’s contemporary soundtrack. There’s an impressionism to the movie, not just in out there sequences where drug trips are rendered in stop-motion and teenage fantasies manifest an elaborate dance routine, but in the way Wilde and company use the tools in the visual toolbox to convey the *feeling* of young adulthood as much as the reality. An underwater sequence in particular is a stunning display of the twisting emotions that kids go through, the heaven and hell that comes with navigating these uneasy spaces.
When *Booksmart* hits on truths like that, in its writing, character development, and visual presentation, it sets a high water mark that’s hard for the rest of the film to meet. With an aimless progression, this movie works better the more time you want to spend in Molly and Amy’s world and recognize it as your own, with laughter and tears that come with it. I confess, while parts of it felt all too familiar, others felt almost alien, through a combination of the film’s comic exaggerations, distance in time, and deliberately specific perspective.
That doesn’t make *Booksmart*’s project any less laudable, though. One of the tough things about film criticism (however amateur it may be) is that, as a good friend of mine once put it, “You can only watch a film as yourself.” It’s not hard to use your empathy to feel for Amy and Molly, or root for them, or hope that everything works out for them. But their experience is so particular to who and when they are that it, shockingly, doesn’t connect with a stuffy thirty-something internet jockey like me.
But it also doesn’t have to. People like me have had their experiences, at all ages and time periods, represented in story, song, and screen for decades, if not centuries, in a way that people like Molly and Amy and Olvia Wilde haven’t. It’s heartening, if nothing else, to think that young women will have *Booksmart* and, with it, the same sort of honest, awkward touchstone that their male counterparts have enjoyed forever. That alone makes this movie worthwhile, and I hope it finds its audience, regardless of whether that includes me.
