GROWING PAINS
Eighth Grade perfectly captures the angst, insecurity of being a middle-school teen
Eighth Grade is a great title for a movie, but to be precise it should really have been called Eighth Grade 2017. There are plenty of movies about school life — mostly high-school life, to be fair — but they exist in the time they were made, or the time they’re set, or a weird combination of the two. (I’m lookin’ at you, Grease.)
They also tend to feature schoolkids who talk the way Hollywood screenwriters think kids talk, or the way screenwriters remember talking when they were young — or again, in a weird stew, the way they remember they WISHED they used to talk.
Eighth Grade has none of that. In the first self-shot video we see from Grade 8 student
Kayla (Elsie Fisher), she tries to explain what it means to be yourself. “And it’s like, you know, but, um, like, uh,” she says at one point, stringing together enough fillers and discourse markers to set a record (for a non-politician) for speaking without saying anything. Having eventually Magellan-ed her way around to the notion that being yourself means, like, being yourself, she signs off with a perky: “Gucci!”
Kayla is Homo sapiens binarii. These are the digitally immersed humans, and while you may fancy yourself as one of them, you’re not running the latest OS. Kayla has had Snapchat since Grade
5, a fact that freaks out some high-school kids she befriends; they conclude she must be “wired differently.”
She is. Voted “most quiet” by her fellow students, Kayla is that shy bundle of angst and anxiety that everyone is at 13, unless they were lucky enough to hit it at 12 or dodge it until 14. But when she gets a crush on a boy — viewers will be yelling at the screen for her to steer clear of this randy doofus — she clumsily suggests she might have “private pictures” of herself in order to pique his interest. Anything sexual and unclear is immediately Googled. And rather than keep a diary, she uploads her thoughts on “putting yourself out there” to YouTube, where it’s unclear if anyone is even listening.
Eighth Grade is the feature debut of writer-director Bo Burnham, who is now 27 but found fame a decade ago on a then-new YouTube; he went on to become a standup comic. Clearly, despite being twice Kayla’s age and the opposite sex, he’s managed to tap into some of the eternal insecurities of pubescence.
Take the scene where Kayla goes to a popular girl’s pool party, which plays out like a weird version of that dream where you’re accidentally naked. True, at a pool you’re only half naked, but you also can’t just wake up from it. Kayla winds up sequestered in the living room, frantically calling her dad to tell him the party’s over and would he please, please, please come get her?
As thoroughly and improbably as Burnham has crafted the character of Kayla, he has also cast his generational net in the other direction to create her well-meaning, out-of-his-depth Gen-X dad (Josh Hamilton). The poor guy has to absorb every random blast of teen anger, secure in the knowledge that no response will be the right one, because there is no such thing. But, bless him, he tries.
In many ways, Eighth Grade feels like a middle-school version of Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig ’s Oscar-nominated 2017 film about the last days of high school. (A24 is the U.S. distributor for both.) And I yearn to see what Kayla will be like in five years, should Burnham pull a Richard Linklater and catch up with her again.
Fisher will still be the right age. Many movies skew older in their choice of actors to play kids; again, Grease. But Fisher, who got her start eight years ago as the voice of little orphan Agnes in Despicable Me, had herself just finished Grade 8 when filming began on Eighth Grade. And whether through natural acting prowess or natural being-13ness, she nails the part.
And without making this shy phenom too precocious, the screenplay allows a little articulation to shine through the ums and likes of puberty. “To be confident you have to be brave,” Kayla says in another of her video confessionals, “and to be brave you have to be scared.” (Darned if The Rock didn’t say the very same thing in last week’s new release Skyscraper!)
There’s more going on in Eighth Grade than you might initially think. Vote this one “most quiet” if you want, but listen up and you’ll realize it has a lot to say.