‘Booksmart’ is Olivia Wilde’s ultimate flex to directing
LOS ANGELES — The rebel kid from high school just made the coming-ofage movie of summer.
When she was in her teens, Olivia Wilde, the independent city girl who was raised in Washington, D.C., by two journalists, found herself at the elite boarding school Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where she chafed at the idea of “signing out” to go to town.
“Suddenly, I was in boarding school in the suburbs, in the woods. I got in trouble for dumb things because the idea of being monitored and signing in all the time really confused me,” said Wilde, whose directorial debut, “Booksmart,” opened in theaters Friday.
The rules were hers to break on “Booksmart,” where Wilde stays behind the camera directing a story of best friends Molly (Beanie Feldstein), the forthright valedictorian, and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), gay and happily a wallflower, who arrive at graduation realizing that, while they sacrificed a social life to ensure entry to prestigious colleges, their hard-partying classmates somehow got into the same schools.
Determined to change their own narrative, the BFFs embark on a raucous night to remember.
“Booksmart,” which follows in a long tradition of generation-defining teen movies, from “The Breakfast Club” to “Dazed and Confused,” has earned a 100% fresh critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with New York magazine calling it “a small miracle” and The New Yorker deeming the comedy “wise and humbling.”
But directing it required Wilde to get out of her own way. Until six years ago, Wilde was the glam “It” girl, who earned her stripes playing a groundbreaking bisexual on the teen soap “The O.C.” before making waves on “House” and in the sci-fi “Tron” franchise.
Then came an experimental phase. She starred in auteur-led films like Joe Swanberg’s highly improvised “Drinking Buddies” and Spike Jonze’s “Her.” She met Jason Sudeikis, got engaged and had two kids, Otis, 5, and Daisy, 2. (Sudeikis plays the beleaguered principal in “Booksmart.”)
“I truly believe that having children — certainly for me, but I would argue for many women — made me feel a sense of confidence and inspiration that allowed me to move to a different stage of my life,” she said. “Once I had a baby, I was like, ‘Wow, what can’t I do? This is extraordinary. It’s miraculous what I can juggle.’ ”
Wilde began to flex. She directed music videos for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. She shot the pilot for HBO’s “Vinyl” three weeks after giving birth to Otis.
Then she found the script for “Booksmart,” a teen comedy that had been floating around for a decade before “it went into the dusty files of scripts that don’t ever get made,” said Wilde, who pitched herself to direct it in 2015. She and screenwriter Katie Silberman began rewriting the script to reflect individualistic, fluid, radically inclusive Generation Z high school kids today.
Feldstein, whose brother Jonah Hill starred in 2007’s “Superbad”, said the resulting film “is saying we are more than just our bodies or who we are interested in sexually or where we come from or our religion. They play a part in who we are, but they are not the only thing about us.”
Most refreshing? The R-rated, oftenbawdy “Booksmart” rises above bodyshaming and showcases a spectrum of sexuality without force-feeding preachy messages of acceptance.