GIRLS RULE IN ‘BOOKSMART’
BEANIE FELDSTEIN, LEFT, AND KAITLYN DEVER PLAY BEST FRIENDS IN “BOOKSMART.”
“Booksmart,” the first feature film by Olivia Wilde, doesn’t play it safe. It announces a first-time director with lots of skill and a willingness to make choices. And everything Wilde does, she does for a reason.
Let’s look at one scene. The movie is a coming-of-age comedy focusing on two girls, best friends about to graduate high school. They get into an argument at a party. Wilde films the argument in one long take, rather than going back and forth from one character to the other. Why? Because the scene is not about this person feeling one thing and the other person feeling something else. It’s about the fact that they’re arguing, and to an extent, about the phenomenon of friends arguing.
Then, at a certain point in the scene, Wilde cranks up the soundtrack and drops out the voices, so that even though they’re still talking, we can’t hear them. And why not? They’re barely hearing each other anyway, and it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. Thus, through her choices, Wilde tells us the precise way that the scene is important and the ways in which it isn’t.
This is a strong debut for Wilde. She didn’t just stumble up and make a good movie. Yes, the script may have been strong to begin with, full of fun vignettes and a warm spirit that embraces everyone on screen. But Wilde vigorously made this picture, finding the tone and teasing out the laughs and the performances with a combination of bold and subtle strokes.
In the end, though, the fact of the movie, the fact that it’s being perceived as a breakthrough, may be more important than the movie itself. Like “Superbad,” it’s about one amazing night as experienced by a pair of high school students, who know that time is precious, that they are preparing to say goodbye to this period of their lives. As in similar films, “Booksmart” delivers a first-time sex scene, only this time it’s a lesbian sex scene. There’s coarse and honest talk throughout, and gross-out visuals, but this time it’s girls involved. And a woman directed it, and four women wrote it.
This makes for a subtle and positive shift in the genre. Instead of the cliché of boys pursuing sex in a frantic way, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are searching for
something more nuanced. In a perfectly pitched early scene, Molly — the more aggressive and confident of the two friends — has her worldview shattered when she realizes that she and Amy didn’t need to spend four years avoiding parties and social life just to get into Ivy League schools. Their classmates, it turns out, will be attending those same schools, but they had fun for four years.
So the two book-smart girls decide to get an education in fun
in their last night before graduation.
Some of the incidents are labored — an interlude on a party boat strains for laughs, and the mad drive to the graduation day ceremony seems like a failed effort to inject excitement where there isn’t any. But a surprising number of scenes are strong, including a conversation between the girls and a pizza delivery driver (Michael Patrick O’Brien) that takes some interesting turns. And Feldstein and Dever are very good at making us believe they’ve been friends for life.
However, while I have your attention, you know what movie is even better than this? “Never Goin’ Back” (2018) from Dallas writer-director Augustine Frizzell, about two 17-year-old girls trying to raise money for a weekend getaway. It’s something like “Booksmart,” minus the rich Californians and the faint whiff of politically correct self-congratulation. Unfortunately, no one saw “Never Goin’ Back” because it’s about working-class girls in Texas.