TIFF 2010: EASY A Review

Funny, but not unusual at a film festival, to see a documentary about the crumbling, actually, quite crumbled, American school system (Waiting For Superman) back to back with a Hollywood neo-John Hughes picture.  If nothing else it underscores that the high schools portrayed in the multiplexes are gigantic and facile 'drama engines.'  Not news to you, but it is something that Easy A has a lot of fun being and exploiting at the earnest distance of Juno and the romantic fantasy of Say Anything, or perhaps more specifically (because the film keeps coming back to it again and again) Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  So I have established that this is a very meta high-school movie that that knows its Juno from its Ghost World to its Veronica Mars to (oddly enough with its elaborate school tracking shot, amongst other things) Donnie Darko.  Yes, it is a high school movie written by and for people in their thirties and forties.  And it is flattering enough to have most of the adult supporting players, an all-star list including Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci and Thomas Hayden Church pander (and comment on their pandering) to that audience.  And yet the whole glossy affair is still pretty darned endearing.

Olive is smart, funny, sexy (although the film would have you believe that she is 'ignored for being plain' or maybe because her bff has big tits...) has a stable home life.  Her great parents are self-aware, supporting,  and confident in their progeny (including an adopted child).  She is still lonely enough to crave for a little attention and this comes from a lie, to her best friend, in how she lost her virginity.  The rumor mill may be aided by all the mobile digital toys, but it is no more (maybe much less) accurate in the age of texting and facebook.   More specifically, gossip is and always was much more about how it makes the gossipers get off, than the folks at the vortex of the juicy tidbit.  Thus the literary connection in the movie (not Mark Twain, but he gets a few amusing nods) which it literally wears on its breast, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter.  When Olive is branded the school slut, he doesn't take it quietly, she hyper-exaggerates it, to the point of embroidering her own red A on all of her wardrobe which takes a sharp turn towards the skanky.    Ah the age of narcissism.  Actually, it quite works as the film sets itself up quite early and quite nicely by having Olive open a 'musical birthday card' from her grandparents with the sappiest pop song imaginably tweeting out of the micro-chip sewn in.  First she declares it as 'the most cliché thing ever' then has it blasting out at full volume from her laptop, her mobile-phone ring-tone, etc. etc.  Dismissal leads to ironic embrace leads to un-ironic embrace.  And so goes the tone of Easy A, the thing is over-written in the same (but not quite the same) way as Juno, but relentless chips away at your cynicism to such things so that you are humming along with its clock-work mechanisms that wrap things up with a big bright bow.

It certainly doesn't hurt to have a wonderful performance from Emma Stone at the center.  While her character exists completely within th movies 'Clerks-y' universe of big worded title cards (again ironic mention of this within the film) and sophisticated joke-call backs, her manner and her character is a happy cross-mix of Janeane Garofalo and Zoe Bell.  It is a refreshing break from the Zooey Deschanel manic pixie-girl set that has been cropping up a lot as of late in the indie(ish) American comedies.  Stone is in every frame and owns every frame with a charming presence (Welcome to your legitimate shot at the A list (see what I did there?) Ms. Stone.)  Even though the lesson on hand for Olive is that if you try to please everyone you end up pleasing nobody, the movie doesn't believe it too much and doesn't want you to believe it either (strangely no ironic commentary on this one, perhaps it means it).  If auto-criticism as a defense mechanism is not your thing, you might want to take a pass, for everyone else it is faster than reading the Hawthorn novel, and hey, John Hughes references.