One of the last things in the world you’re going to see me get excited about is a raunchy comedy starring Cameron Diaz. So when I first started seeing the advertising material for Bad Teacher I was suspicious. Very suspicious. It looked like it could be funny enough, it had some comedic actors I like in small roles, but that Diaz in the lead role thing was really a stickler. You see: Cameron Diaz isn’t funny. Sure she’s funny for a famous pretty person, and this has got her a reputation as being a comedic actress, but funny for a famous pretty person mostly just means that you’re bubbly and a good sport. It means that you’re willing to throw yourself into absurd situations without being self-conscious; it doesn’t mean that you’re actually funny. A lot of what Cameron Diaz does in a comedy probably won’t be all that great, but she’ll make you laugh once or twice. And hey, she’s famous and pretty, how much more could you ask of her? I’d ask for a lot more. But luckily for us, in Bad Teacher I don’t really have to. Diaz isn’t asked to do much broad comedy here; she’s just asked to be a horrible bitch and keep a straight face. Her character relies less on gags, one liners, and comedic timing for laughs than it does just saying the worst things the screenwriters could think of and getting a shocked reaction from the audience. So, in that respect, Bad Teacher isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it had the potential to be. Actually, it manages to be consistently amusing throughout. But it also has enough problems with its storytelling that it’s not a complete success either.
The horrible bitch that Diaz is playing is named Elizabeth Halsey. She’s a middle school teacher, but she seems to have only gotten into the teaching game because you get summers off and the standards for teachers in this country allow her to slip by with only doing the bare minimum. Her real passion, and the task that gets the focus of her talent and ingenuity, is finding a rich man to marry and bleed dry. When we meet her she has found just that and is gleefully ending her last year in the miserable position of being a mentor to snot nosed tweens; but then things don’t quite go as she planned. When she gets home from work she’s met with the horrible sight of her husband to-be and mother in-law to-be looking solemn. The mother has convinced the child that his fiancé doesn’t love him and is just after his money. The wedding is off, all of Elizabeth’s toys are taken away, and she has to go back to her job as a teacher. Not good, for her or the students. The rest of the film is a detailing of the shameless way she tries to ensnare another rich man and the mindless way that she floats through her job without ever actually teaching her students anything. With a bunch of dirty jokes thrown in to keep you awake.
There’s always a danger when you’re using a raunchier sort of humor. If you’re competent enough at pulling off a gag, then being dirty can be a quick and easy way to get a laugh out of an audience. But if you’re not funny at all, trying to be raunchy and failing thuds louder than any other kind of failed humor out there. I’m talking about the unfunny experience of watching a giant bush of pubic hair being trimmed with a weed wacker in a Scary Movie sequel, or frat guys eating pastries full of dog semen in Van Wilder. If there’s one huge accomplishment that can be credited to Bad Teacher it’s that it actually manages to correctly utilize Cameron Diaz’s limited comedic talents, but if there’s another one it’s that it manages to do raunchy well and not go overboard. This film works in the realm of colorfully worded and shocking comments and avoids the pitfalls of geysers of period blood, or whatever other over-the-top tricks gross out films are going to resort to next when they get really desperate. There’s only one farty sort of poop joke, and when it happens it sticks out like a sore thumb among slightly subtler comedy that all worked pretty well.
Probably my favorite gag in the film involved the matter of Justin Timberlake and dry humping. It’s a subject I haven’t seen mined for laughs in anything before and it had the audience I saw this with, especially the girls, squirming in simultaneous discomfort and delight. That’s exactly the sort of reaction you should be going for when it comes to comedy like this. But I should add that successfully making somebody laugh at sexual weirdness isn’t exactly the kind of comedy that I most respect, no matter how effective it can be. Being clever is so much more impressive than being crass, and Bad Teacher rarely manages to be anything other than the latter. There’s a segment of the population who is going to eat the sort of naughty talk that this film has to offer up (think your uncle), but as someone who has grown up on the Internet, being mean and talking dirty doesn’t exactly strike me as the freshest approach to comedy in the world.
While the film does okay for itself in the laughs department, it falters in the category of structure and pacing. The plot takes quite a while to get off the ground. The conflict arises when Justin Timberlake’s character, a new substitute teacher who seems to come from money, starts working at the school. He’s recently broken up with his longtime girlfriend, she of ample chest, and Elizabeth decides that if she were to get a boob job she could woo the broken hearted heir to a fortune and return to living on easy street. The only problem is, she doesn’t have near enough money to get the operation done. Eventually a plan is formed when she finds out that the teacher whose students perform the best on a state test gets a huge cash bonus, but that plan doesn’t get formulated until we’re at least half way through the film. Before that we kind of just watch Elizabeth flounder and try to figure out a plan of action. There’s a bit of love triangle struggling between Elizabeth, Timberlake’s Scott Delacorte, and a rival teacher named Ms. Squirrel (Lucy Punch) that provides some conflict early on, but it never gets enough focus to keep you engaged. There are funny gags during the first half of the film, and that kept me from being completely bored, but things don’t really start moving until she finds purpose much later on. At one point during the first half of the film I even found myself yawning at exactly the same time that Diaz’s character did. I can’t think of a review of a film anymore serendipitous than that.
As I said earlier, the character of Elizabeth is a good fit for Cameron Diaz, especially at this stage of her career. Normally I wouldn’t asses an actor’s looks in a review of a movie, but as this film makes it a huge point to sell itself on a flaunting of Diaz’s body, I think a mention is appropriate. Point blank, Diaz is looking a lot older than she was the last time I saw her. That actually works really great for this character, as an aging lady who has long floated by on looks alone and is now getting desperate for a permanent source of support works better if the actress playing the role isn’t still young and gorgeous; but I don’t think that the film is self aware about what it did there. The way Elizabeth flaunts her sexuality doesn’t seem ironic or Meta in the slightest, especially during a car wash sequence that seems to exist solely to titillate the movie’s audience. Diaz is in great shape, looks great for her age, and is able to pull the scene off; but that last bit of “for her age” is a thing that you now need to tack on when describing her. I can’t help but think that if Diaz wanted to blatantly use her looks to draw people to her films, then ten years ago would have been a better time to do it. While this role is a better fit for her than most, and she manages to at least be passable in it, I can’t help but wish that an actress blessed with innate comedic timing like an Emma Stone was old enough to get cast here. If so, this film might have risen from mediocre to good.
Justin Timberlake seemed to get second billing in the advertising, but that’s more due to what a big star he is than how much he gets to do in the movie. Really, for being the center of a love triangle and the object of Elizabeth’s unseemly desires, Timberlake doesn’t get all that much screen time. And his character is vague and ill defined. I could never tell if he was supposed to be some yuppie dreamboat, or just a patsy dork. It wasn’t clear to me if his strange way of interacting with women was due to the fact that he was super religious, secretly gay, or just a crafty predator trying to get with girls who have big boobs. The character felt inconsistent from scene to scene, and came off as just an excuse to let Timberlake act goofy. Scott felt more like a plot device and a chance to say, “hey look, we got Justin Timberlake in our movie” than he did a fully crafted character.
Lucy Punch might be the MVP. I had seen her playing a ditsy gold digger in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and I liked her in that role, but I had no idea she had the range to play the sort of character that she does here. I had just assumed she was a character actress who could pull off a good blonde ditz, but in this movie she plays a completely different type, and finds just as much success. Punch’s Amy Squirrel is a tightly wound, puritanical sort of Midwestern lady who might seem completely wholesome if she didn’t have an obvious, overpowering mania bubbling underneath her surface at every moment. With Diaz’s character being so despicable, this movie ran the risk of the audience not liking or rooting for the protagonist at all. But Punch makes for such a loathsome antagonist that it becomes no problem to root for even a piece of crap like Elizabeth Halsey. Punch has to be seen as a huge reason why this movie didn’t end up a failure. And the reoccurring, mysterious references to “what happened in 2008” with Ms. Squirrel was one of my favorite gags in the film. You never quite find out what the other characters are talking about, but it always lends an air of menace to Squirrel’s manic behavior.
Diaz, Timberlake, and Punch are also surrounded by a crew of talented supporting actors playing the rest of the school’s teachers, who all get tragically underutilized, down to the person. Jason Segel shows up as the schlubby gym teacher who has a laid back attitude to seemingly everything other than the matter of getting Elizabeth into bed; a task that he approaches with Terminator like determination. He seems to just wander through the film, popping up here and there to say something funny or react to a situation incredulously, and every time he shows up he’s the best thing the movie has to offer. But if you added up all of his screen time I doubt that it would amount to more than ten or fifteen minutes. The Office’s Phyllis Smith shows up as a mousey, pushover sidekick to Elizabeth, and is able to generate a couple chuckles in the role. But their relationship never gets explored past an introductory lunch and one scene where Elizabeth takes it upon herself to get an unwitting and innocent Phyllis stoned during a school dance. If this film had managed to develop a real friendship between such an odd couple, people might be talking about it with the same affection that they do the recent Bridesmaids. Sadly, that is not the case. And in addition to this core group of characters we also get Dave Allen bringing the funny with his usual burnt-out-hippy character work, John Michael Higgins getting a shamefully small amount of attention as the dolphin obsessed principle, Eric Stonestreet breaking far away from his Modern Family character by playing Elizabeth’s dumb slob of a roommate, The Upright Citizen Brigade’s Matt Besser playing an Abe Lincoln impersonator with real pain in his eyes, and Thomas Lennon playing a stupendously lame administrator of state academic tests who has an Annie fetish.
