REVIEW OF THE REVIEWS: Booksmart

 
     Booksmart, a teen comedy directed by actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde, has earned an impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It involves two particularly driven students who, on their last day of high school, realize that their choice to study instead of party was moot, since the kids who did both still got into great colleges and had bright futures. Anxious for self-redemption, they spend their last night of high school partying to make up for lost time. Despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews, a handful of negative reviews have been written up about it, including Richard Brody's "'Booksmart,' Reviewed: Olivia Wilde's Toothless Teen Comedy" featured in the New Yorker. Mostly critical, Brody employs snark and condescension throughout the piece to convey a general distaste for the "toothless" comedy. I use "snark" in particular because Brody argues that Wilde missed the mark in accurately depicting the "high school snark tank" as it is in actuality. He characterizes the plot as "scantly developed," a "dismayingly oversimplified" picture of modern high school culture.
     Though he frowns upon the essentially frivolous adventures of the main characters (namely, cramming four years of missed high school partying into one night -- the night before graduation), he does praise the "exceptional presences" of actors in the "vibrant cast." This is a small accolade, though, since he finds major hangups in the politics present in the movie. Most of the characters are extremely liberal -- almost satirically so, in Brody's eyes. The representation of various classes are scant and varyingly favored, since the one creep in the movie is also the only working-class person, and the one insanely rich kid ends up being the most benevolent and virtuous of them all. More than that, Brody presses that the movie entirely omits itself from the Trump era, despite its politically charged... everything. Again, everyone's a liberal. Brody finds this unrealistic.
     On the other hand, Linda Holmes extols Booksmart in her NPR review, "'Booksmart' Is a Wise And Warm Summer Comedy". Less focused on the politics of the movie or really anything other than the dynamic of the two main girls in the context of their high school life, Holmes' review strikes me as a gleeful relishing of the relationship between these two girls (and of the casting job as a whole). Simply put, the movie is about the girls coming to terms with themselves and their peers by rejecting the notion that "smart kids are un-fun and fun kids are un-smart." A touching sentiment. I could speculate that the review is written so simply because at the end of the day, the movie covers a tale as old as time: besties navigating high school together. I don't think this is the case, though, since Holmes declares right out the gate that this movie defies cinematic typecasting, especially of the characters.
     In analyzing the girls' relationship, she focuses on the dynamics between Molly, the adventurous, and Amy, the less adventurous. Molly coerces Amy to take risks (calculated ones, at that), but when Amy shies away, Molly grows frustrated. Holmes notes that this bubbles over at the climax of the movie when they have what we can assume to be their first real fight, mentioning that its the "feel of it" that matters, not what's being said; this gives us important tells about their relationship, even when the dialogue is intentionally muted.
   Brody, sans criticism, notes that the "second, unsought product of [the girls'] big night out is knowledge and empathy, and learning to question the disparaging assumptions they've made about their classmates who seemingly coasted through high school." I agree with his point because throughout the movie, the girls made it very clear that they had no interest in fraternizing with their brutish, party-fiend classmates. They were driven, and their peers weren't... or so they thought. Throughout the movie, the girls inadvertently humanized their classmates as they saw more and more of who they were outside of school and what desires or vulnerabilities motivated their actions.
     Additionally, as I noted before, I really appreciate the point that Holmes makes about the movie's climax when the girls have a particularly upsetting argument: "it's not what is said in this moment that matters, but the feel of it. It matters how everything explodes at once, and you realize you can learn how these girls fight without even knowing every word they're saying." Because the sound blurs and all we see are emphatic gestures and expressive faces, it really does become more about the strain that has built up on their relationship and the breaking point they've finally reached. I remember being particularly touched by the desperation on Amy's face as she retaliates against Molly's raining criticisms. Fighting is foreign to these girls, so the blurred sound eventually turns into a sort of white noise that I think mimics the rush of adrenaline they must have felt as they released their frustrations on one other for the first time, encircled by peers eagerly videotaping it all.
     Ok. So, I've never seen this film. Booksmart? Weird name -- maybe a play on words. Don't know much about it, but these reviews told me all I needed to know. Brody's review of the movie is the most convincing to me in terms of what to expect of the overall quality and nuance. While Holmes' review is sunny, Brody has a more qualified stance. He admits that there are many flaws: plot, character arcs, political undercurrents, etc. Still, he allows that the actors are phenomenal, brilliantly sharp and goofy, even in a setting that seemed contrived. His vocabulary was varied, rich, and natural, which really helped his ethos as a reliable information-conveyor and opinion-provider. Brody seemed mature and contemplative. Holmes also seemed contemplative in her brief psyche-analysis of the two girls, but her overall vocabulary was simple. Truthfully, she struck me as a bit of a Pollyanna, and it's always hard to commit yourself to an entirely positive perspective.
     If it were me writing a film review, I'd definitely focus on the acting. Since I'm very involved in theater, it's probably the aspect of performances that I focus on the most. I'd also consider how well the music tied into the flow of the movie. If it was clunky and made the movie feel disjointed, or if it was too popular of music and made the soundtrack feel cheap, that'd certainly change the way I'd perceive the quality of the movie as a whole. I'd also consider the dialogue, since I always think more highly of movies with realistic dialogue: overlapping comments, silence, messiness, or thoughts that trail off, to name a few characteristics. I think I'd probably leave out shot types and lighting unless they were integral to the progression of the story (like Memento, for example), since focusing on those aspects detracts my focus from the other aspects I noted above. I also wouldn't spend much time analyzing the special effects since nowadays, most special effects in movies are all pretty top-notch. I'd also have to take into account the year that the movie was released, since I couldn't rip apart the ridiculous special effects of the original Star Wars trilogy when it was essentially the first of its kind in the 70's.