Easy A (***)

For those who loved the high school comedies of the 1980s and '90s comes an homage so sincere that the heroine tells us how she’d like her life to be like one. The archetypical—though not always optimal—high school movie stars college-age actors and revolves somehow around the themes of popularity and sexual awakening. The plot often turns on a main character undergoing some kind of drastic change that usually only characters in high school comedies undergo. Olive (Emma Stone), an unusually smart, virginal girl, undergoes a drastic change, but mostly insofar as her reputation is concerned. Perhaps reassuring to those who’ve paid too much attention to articles about teen “sexting,” being “easy” (for a girl) is still the source of shame in the age of social media, at least at Olive’s middle class California high school, which means there’s some tricky knot-tying to be done, script-wise, so as to have Olive embracing the literal scarlet letter (see the title) she wears. It does not make her popular, especially with the Christian youth group in the school whose snotty leader (Amanda Bynes, heroine of many a high school movie) functions as the stock villain.

Nothing about the plot or theme, including the romantic ending you can see coming an hour away, makes the movie stand above similar movies. While the Hester Prynne allusions and the silly youth group suggest a condemnation of intolerance, in other ways—like part where the youth group leader absurdly becomes buddies with Olive — the film muddies whether the other students are wrong to judge her or just wrong to believe the rumors. Apparently, as in all other teen movies, the moral is—spoiler alert (sort of)—“how shitty it feels to be an outcast.” Has Olive learned nothing from those old teen comedies?

No, what elevates the movie to slightly above average is that Olive has, and Stone gives her, a bit more personality, or maybe reality, than most similar characters. Meaning, partly, that she’s realistically brainy and genuinely witty, which is good since the plot overly relies on her narration. I also particularly liked Olive’s scenes with her teacher (Thomas Hayden Church) and her (non-dorky!) parents, played by and Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. Their hip-couple banter is amusing without making them into caricatures of ultraliberal parenting. I say amusing; the humor is mild. “Remember to cross ‘watch The Bucket List’ off our bucket list,” is one of the funnier lines. Well, it was funny to me.

IMDB link

viewed 12/10/11 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 12/10/11