‘Eighth Grade’ makes its mark as the anti-‘Lady Bird’
PARK CITY, Utah – Greta Gerwig says she wrote Lady Bird as the girl she always wished she had been in high school: confident, quick-witted and unabashedly herself.
Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, on the other hand, painfully captures who most of us were a few years earlier during those awkward middle-school years — only with the advent of social media to make kids feel that much more insecure.
The sharply observed comedy, which premiered Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival and already has been picked up by Lady Bird distributor A24, charts the momentous last week of eighth grade for Kayla (breakthrough Elsie Fisher), an acned, murmuring preteen who tries to mask her shyness by posting YouTube tutorials on topics like “being yourself ” and “putting yourself out there.” But when she’s not safely hidden behind a screen, she’s flailing in the nine circles of middle-school hell, whether it’s a snooty popular girl’s pool party or a school-shooting drill where she cringingly flirts with her crush.
Burnham, a comedian and YouTuber making his feature directorial debut, says he was inspired in part by his own pubescent years, as well as what it must feel like coming of age in 2018.
“I wanted to write something about the Internet and my own anxiety, and how it felt,” Burnham said at a postscreening Q&A with Fisher and Josh Hamilton, who plays Kayla’s supportive father. “I started writing some big, large story with 10 intersecting characters and I stumbled on (Kayla’s) voice.”
While most of Kayla’s growing pains are universal to anyone who has been in middle school, Burnham doesn’t shy away from some of the more unsettling aspects of being a kid in the digital era. Trying to woo a cute boy in class, Kayla lies through her teeth about having nude pictures and looks up videos on how to give oral sex. She also endures a leering game of truth or dare with a high school senior, who pressures her to take off her shirt — a particularly upsetting interaction to watch that has added res- onance in the Me Too era, as some journalists have pointed out on Twitter.
“The idea of being young and taken advantage of by someone older than you is not foreign to me,” Burnham said. “But I felt that it’s true and something that happens, and needed to be shown.”
Eighth Grade has been well-received at Sundance, with much of the credit for the film’s success going to Fisher, 14, who appears in every scene. Although dissimilar in personality, the actress’ own experience with the movie closely mirrors that of Kayla’s: She graduated eighth grade a week before shooting and started high school a week after production wrapped.
“I was able to take from my experiences just coming from eighth grade and my actual final week and translate them into this,” Fisher said.
Asked how she likes high school, she was charmingly ambivalent: “It’s cool. Not my favorite.”