Fun Fun Fun

Booksmart a film by Olivia Wilde.  With Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jessica Williams, Victoria Ruesga.  ****1/2

My first reaction was to be stunned at the sheer talent this movie displays.  The hilarious screenplay was written by four women.  How does that work?  Olivia Wilde’s direction—in her first crack at a full-length movie—is inventive and fast-paced but never frantic.  All of the acting is great.  The actors are good-looking.  They’re into their twenties, not the high school seniors they’re supposed to be, but even so, it’s incredible how talented they are at such young ages.

The plot is simple, and apparently belongs to a rich tradition of such high school movies, though I haven’t seen most of them.  Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are overachieving best friends at a raucous high school in Los Angeles.  Maybe it’s raucous because it’s the last day, but still.  They’ve sacrificed their social lives to their academic careers, and they’re not sorry; Amy is on her way to Columbia and Molly to Yale.  But as they discover on their last day (this sudden discovery is one unbelievable part of the script, but we gloss over it), their friends who have been goofing off got into good colleges too.  Or as one girl puts it: “I’m incredible at hand jobs but I also got 1560 on my SAT’s.”  Amy and Molly sacrificed their high school social lives unnecessarily.  They have one night to make up for it.

As you might expect from such nerds, they’re politically correct to the nth degree.  Amy is an out lesbian, though she’s never actually kissed a girl, and her parents (Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) are cool with it.  They actually believe Amy and Molly are lovers.  The girls are just extremely good friends, even though they’re physically affectionate and talk openly about such subjects as how they masturbate and how many women are going to be “up” Amy’s vagina when she gets to Columbia.  Such dialogue was a tad startling to me, but I enjoyed it.  If there’s one aspect of the movie that does seem over the top, it’s how caring and understanding and just plain goofy and embarrassing Amy’s parents are (I say that as someone who once worked at Duke University, where helicopter parents are a dime a dozen).  Molly, on the other hand, seems to have no parents at all.

Amy has a crush on a cute girl named Ryan (Victoria Ruesga), though she hasn’t done much to let her know.  Molly secretly has a crush on the student body vice president—she was the president—though she hasn’t let even Amy know that.  They head off into the night hoping to do something about these attractions, at least to admit to them, but all kinds of roadblocks are thrown in their way, starting with the fact that they don’t know the address of the major graduation party.  But it’s not the Destination, it’s the Journey, as Ralph Waldo Emerson may or may not have said, so the girls head off into the night.

Everything about the parties they go to, the people they see, is completely over the top; this is one wealthy community, where a kid actually has a huge yacht for the evening, and all kinds of servants.  The school’s thespians are flamingly gay (instead of being closeted as they were in my day) and stage a role-playing party of their own.  And the cast of high school seniors is populated by stock characters: the kid who is trying to buy everyone’s friendship, the girl who will try anything, the class slut (named Triple A because she gives roadside assistance), the cool teacher everyone loves, the worn-out cynical principal.  People who begin as stock characters eventually prove they have another side.  They all wind up halfway human.

Ultimately, though, inasmuch as this is a serious movie—which is not very much—it’s a portrait of female friendship.  The focus is on Amy and Molly from beginning to end.  And though people seem to be indulging in outrageous ways, at least with drinking if not with drugs, and in an atmosphere that verges on being an orgy rather than a high school party, nobody gets hurt, or falling down drunk, or OD’s.  Even when the police show up it’s essentially a comic moment.

I keep coming back to the script and direction.  The overwhelming feeling of this movie is that it’s funny, and fun.  Of course there’s not a high school class in the world where everybody is this talented and good-looking—think back to your own class—but we suspend disbelief because we’re enjoying ourselves so much.  If this is the new generation of Hollywood actors, they can definitely do comedy, at least comedy about privileged teenagers in L.A.  It will be interesting to see what else they’ve got.