It might seem a bit ridiculous, but I went into Easy A with some pretty high expectations. I’ve watched Emma Stone gain steam little by little over the last few years: a feature role in Superbad here, a nice turn in Zombieland there. Heck, I even liked her playing broad slapstick in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past opposite Sir Mathew McConaughey. When I started to see the trailers for this film it seemed that it could very well be the perfect vehicle for her to break through and achieve a higher position of status over in Tinseltown. First off, I kind of have a soft spot for teen comedies to begin with. Not to say that I would stick many of them on any year-end lists, but the setup is usually standard enough and hard enough to mess up that you know what you’re going to get going in. Second, the writer and director were both unfamiliar to me, with hardly any feature credits to their name and thus no pre-existing strikes on their records. And third, it seemed like it had a strong premise that was a step more interesting than the normal teen comedy plot. Add it all up and I was hoping that Easy A would be my favorite teen movie since Mean Girls. Unfortunately, while I did think that Emma Stone did a serviceable job with what she was given, the writer and director now both have strikes in my record book as Easy A proved to be little more than a good premise poorly executed. It is certainly no Mean Girls. Or even one of those three-word-titled teen movies from the early part of the decade that could all be enjoyed as guilty pleasures.
Since the premise and the lead actress were the two things that I liked best, they’re what I’ll start with. Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is an of above average intelligence and therefore invisible to her peers high school student. Her social life is so lame that she even has to lie about what she did over the weekend to her best friend. As we’ve learned from countless tragedies and noirs, one little lie can be all that it takes to spin our life out of control and put us into the gutter. Unfortunately for Olive, her little lie about losing her virginity to a community college boy is over heard by the local moral crusader Marianne (Amanda Bynes), and before you know it she is the talk of the school. The talk being that she’s a nasty slut. Picking up on this, the local gay kid Brandon (Dan Byrd) hatches an evil scheme. Sick of getting picked on and abused for his sexual proclivities, Brandon figures that he’s only one public fling with a female away from gaining a little peace and anonymity. Since Olive’s reputation is already ruined, it just makes sense that she would accept money to tell every one that they did the deed. Of course, once she agrees, the situation is quick to snowball. Soon every nerd and outcast in the school is coming to Olive with the same sob story and setting up the same deal. Before you know it, her reputation is toxic. She goes as far as to attach a scarlet “A” to all of her shirts both in honor of the book they are reading in English class and in defiance of the judgmental gossip that rules the social zeitgeist of her school.
Stone has a charm and comedic timing that is rare enough in most actors, but is super rare in those that happen to be beautiful young women. Given the proper material to work with and the right platform to be featured on I have no doubt that she will become a huge star. Unfortunately, she’s not given much to work with here. The dialogue that she’s given is wordy, wooden, and stilted. And the gags that make up the comedic portion of this script are misses far more often than they are hits. She’s, of course, far too attractive to believably play the role of the wallflower, but that’s more a fault of the casting procedure than it is the actress herself, and such a common complaint that it feels kind of mundane to bring it up at all. Actors in commercial pictures are always going to be more attractive than the characters that they are playing; that’s just the reality we’re living in.
Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci play Olive’s parents. That might seem like a strangely too respectable duo to portray a throwaway pair of parents in a film such as this, but in a movie where Malcolm McDowell shows up in two scenes as a high school principal I guess all bets are off. They throw themselves into their roles with reckless abandon, playing characters that resemble standup comedians more so than anyone’s actual parents. Their back and forth banter resembles a sort of throwback vaudeville act that is supremely amusing for about five minutes. After that, it just never lets up to the point that their characters become cartoon characters and can’t be taken seriously as parental figures. When they first were introduced I was thinking what great parents they would make. Clever, attentive, and handling their children’s problems with a cool, well adjusted resolve. By the end of the film I wanted to strangle them just to get them to shut up. It would have been nice to get at least one scene where they behaved like real people. Where they dropped the comedic walls and related to Olive on a serious level. Instead, they just continued to produce a constant barrage of quips that left me feeling like nobody would be able to realistically have a conversation consisting of more than a few sentences with them without losing their minds.
Conversely, Thomas Hayden Church had an annoying character that I didn’t like at first but who won me over by the end of the film. He was the hip, relatable English teacher Mr. Griffith; a role that I’ve seen so many times in so many things that I’ve begun to openly rebel against it the second that one of them shows up on a screen. When he first was introduced his too hip for this planet, comedically ultra-dry manner of addressing his students was eye rolling. Church is a charming enough fellow to elevate the material and make it impossible to dislike him, however, and I give him gigantic kudos for pulling off the feat. He did for me what no other actor in this film was quite able to and rose above the bad script to present me with a character that I could get behind.
Other than these few performances I didn’t find the acting important or memorable enough to be worth mentioning, so it now becomes time to address my complaints with the script itself. The story is told in the framework of a series of Youtube videos that Olive is making to confess all of her sins and set the record straight. It’s an annoying, lazy way to present the story and it goes a long way toward sinking this film right out of the gate. The voice over does a lot of the work that interactions between the characters should have. Instead of being drawn into these people’s lives by watching them live out a story, we are related the story by an omniscient narrator. It gives us a layer of separation from the rising action that shouldn’t be there. By the time you leave the theater you feel more like you’ve heard someone explain to you a movie they saw than you feel as if you’ve sat through a movie yourself. Olive tells us everything that happened to her, she tells us how she felt about it, and she sets us up for what comes next. Nothing is left up to the acting or dialogue. Nobody in this film has anything to convey to us; it’s all explained away in the narration. Really, not ruining your film by lazily using a voice over to drive the plot forward is film school 101. This shouldn’t be the type of thing that we still have to deal with when it comes to big studio releases.
Still, it might be a good thing that we aren’t left with only the dialogue to develop the plot and characters for us, as I’m not convinced that the screenwriter has the ability to adequately craft a story without using short cuts. Everyone in this film talks in the same voice. Every one of the characters uses big words, engages in inane wordplay, and relies on highbrow references to create humor. It’s like watching the worst episode of The Gilmore Girls stretched out to feature film length. I was okay with the The Scarlet Letter reference at the center of the film, but once it went on to include references to Mark Twain, French grammar, and the Kinsey Scale of Sexuality I started to get annoyed with how above it’s target audience’s head this film was shooting (okay, for full disclosure I did find the phrase “Kinsey 6 gay” to be pretty funny). If the script were able to present a diverse array of characters who spoke in unique voices and were still able to delight with their wordsmithery, then it would have been truly clever in my eyes. As is, I was just left with the feeling that the movie I was watching was far too desperate to impress and deserved to be pitied. I haven’t seen a film that tried so hard to be liked and annoyed me so thoroughly in the process since Juno.
And in addition to all talking like the same Hollywood writer rather than real people, none of the characters here act like real people would either. Nobody is adequately defined. They act in accordance with how the plot needs them to act and nothing else. They are slaves to the story. Lisa Kudrow shows up pretty far into the movie playing the school’s guidance counselor. I would defy anyone who has seen the film to explain to me who she is as a character. She isn’t a character, she isn’t a person; she is a plot twist. Her character is introduced solely because the story progression needed a character to show up and do what she does and other than that she accomplishes nothing other than being terribly annoying and unbelievably soulless. Her character and performance were probably the most insufferable aspects of this film for me, but the same criticisms could be lobbied toward pretty much everyone else who shows up on the cast list. Who was the gay kid? Just a jumping off point for Olive’s story. He gives us one big, tear-filled monologue about his torture filled existence and then is completely forgotten about once his purpose is served and Olive’s new business has begun. Who was Olive’s best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka)? She is introduced to us as Olive’s closest relationship in the world and yet she is all but written out of the film once the rumors get started. The only reason she exists is so that Olive will have someone to tell her initial lie to and no further thought is given to who this girl is as a character or what role she plays in Olive’s life. There is a guy named Todd (Penn Badgley) who becomes Olive’s love interest and is almost completely an afterthought. Their connection is never explored or exploited. He barely shows up in the film at all. It feels as if Bert V Royal realized that his script didn’t have a romantic climax planned and he hurriedly tacked this character on halfway through the writing process. This is not a substantial film; it’s a fleshed out premise and nothing more. It’s an outline for a movie. A lot more work needed to be put into this script before it went in front of a camera. These paper thin characterizations might have worked in something that was completely farcical and slapstick like Anchorman, but in a film that wants to make commentary on the toxic nature of gossip, young adults finding themselves, how we view teenage sexuality, etc… they’re just completely unacceptable
Easy A
