Easy A (***1/2)

There's a running theme throughout "Easy A" in which its heroine, Olive Penderghast, bemoans the lack of resemblance her own love life bears to that of the heroines of her favorite 80's High School movies. "John Hughes did not direct my life," she grumbles to her webcam. More's the pity for her. More's the pleasure for us. Nostalgia often seems to work on Newfie time, half a generation out of phase. We are loathe to admit the possibility that our parents grew up in a time that was cooler than our own, but when you're 18, well, the 30-year-old teacher always seems to have had it good. It is very much to the credit of this movie, and of Emma Stone, its star, that it makes you want to give a chuckle to her and say "Sister, I grew up in the 80's, and I'll take 'Juno' over 'Sixteen Candles' any day." I'll take "Easy A" too, for that matter, which is a bit of a downgrade from the Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody/Ellen Page mastersnark, but only just.

Not that I have any particular dislike for the collective works of Mr. Hughes, to be clear, it's just that as they (and I) have aged, their true, unfettered belief in the Mystical Power of True Love makes them read almost as fantasy parable, which clashes with the tone they sometimes establish, particularly with regard to his love for the misfits and outcasts. His misfits wanted to be - and were - like anyone else. Deep down, those movies were about similarities, which sometimes makes them come off as facile. What the newest breed of High School comedies - the smartest of them, at least, which includes this one - is doing is better, and more subtle. The misfits and outcasts really are different, they would argue. They're also more interesting.

So here we have Olive Penderghast. She's very, very smart. That's nothing new, of course - intelligence is the High School staple baseline for outcast status, particularly for a pretty girl - but what seems new is the way in which it is presented. I'll love "Say Anything" - another movie referenced liberally by this one - until the day that I die, but it never gave me the actual sense that the Ione Sky character was actually as smart as the movie claimed her to be. Here, Olive's intelligence is presented in more the way that you more regularly actually see it: an inability to shun vocabulary words, an uncommon eloquence, a natural skill with numbers. In a flashback, an eighth-grade Olive tells a boy she has a crush on that of their Seven Minutes in Heaven they have 384 seconds left. He's intimidated by her. Most of her peers surely share that feeling, though it's never actually made explicit. It certainly explains the alacrity with which the knives come out.

It all begins innocently enough, as it must: Olive wants out of a weekend camping trip with her best friend Rhiannon, whose parents are Creepy with a capital C, so she invents a date. Nobody they know, she's quick to extemporize. A boy at her brother's community college. Safe enough. Her only miscalculation, really, comes in underestimating Rhi's pestering after the fact. Unprepared to provide any details, and unready to admit that she actually spent most of the weekend alone in her room with an earworm of a song on an infinite loop (an amusing montage), she carelessly lies that she spent the whole weekend with him. Ohmigod! You lost your V-card to him! No, she tries to explain, but the train has left the station, and it's of no use. The confession that comes is hers, but it's clearly coerced, West Memphis style. Anything to shut the friend up, except that it doesn't. Now she has to invent details. And a funny thing happens: she starts to kind of enjoy it. It's a kind of power over her brash friend that she's not quite used to. Lie after lie starts piling up. It might have been good, clean fun, if not for the fact that the school's resident Jesus-Freak-slash-Gossip-Hound, Marianne, overhears her every last pulsing detail. Soon the rumors of Olive Penderghast: Super-Tramp are abuzz.

Yes, I pause to justify, undoubtedly a nontrivial percentage of the Senior class is no longer unspoiled. The movie knows it to the point that you understand the characters know it, even though it goes pretty much unsaid. That's not really the point, of course. Sex with your boyfriend is one thing, sex - practically ANONYMOUS sex; a ONE-NIGHT-STAND for goodness' sake - with a COLLEGE BOY is something else. Compounding upon that is the fact that it's Olive, the farthest thing from such a sexpot imaginable. It wouldn't exactly make the front page were we to learn that, say, Randy Moss has a different girlfriend in every city he visits. Olive's rep is more like that of Tiger Woods, though: the clean-cut breed whose image of course always makes for the best kind of scandal.

Further compounding the rumors is the fact that she actually kind of enjoys them. To go from thinking of yourself as anonymous to very much not being so, even if it comes in the form of infamy, can be intoxicating. Olive is not immune. She's too smart to be truly invisible, of course, but try telling that to a pretty girl in High School that has trouble finding a date. When she gets called a name in class, she responds by upping the ante (side note: I had no idea that the word "Twat" was suitable for PG-13) and winds up in detention. Her parents discuss the possibility of punishment. It's determined they don't know how. They offer "no dating" as a potential consequence. It's a joke. Everyone laughs. We appreciate her self-deprecation, but it also gets us into her head, and helps to justify the wry smile she gets when she makes a few drastic alterations to her wardrobe - including sewing on a red "A", inspired of course by "The Scarlet Letter", which they are reading in English class - and starts turning heads.

Olive's stint in detention brings her into the orbit of a boy named Brandon, who is clearly on the receiving end of bullying but gets in trouble because the principal is a bully himself. He's a "Kinsey-six gay" (the movie, to its credit, assumes you know to what that refers), and gives a speech to Olive about how they can talk all they want about how things will be better for him in the future, but that that doesn't stop today from being Hell, that's so well-written, and well-acted on both sides, that it actually elevates the whole movie around it. What follows is an act of kindness, brought to a spectacle through Olive's disdain for doing anything half-assed. At a party that weekend, they show up feigning drunkenness, and quickly steal away to an empty bedroom. The fake - though noisy and boisterous - sex that follows is heard by several dozen of their nearest and dearest. Brandon gets a shiny new hetero reputation, easying up on the bullying, and as for Olive, well, everyone is assuming that she's a slut anyway, so no real harm done.

That's the classic double-standard, of course, and the movie, to its credit, doesn't belabor the point, so neither shall I.

The situation escalates, as it must. Soon she is accepting gift cards for similar deals. Sometimes out of kindness, sometimes because, well, what harm is there by now? The scene where a particularly large, unattractive student asks, then meekly threatens, then finally begs for her help is of particular note. You know, she responds, if you'd actually been a gentleman and asked me out straight-up, I might have said yes (that ship having sailed, of course). It's just the right note, in a movie that hits more than a few. All the while, Olive vamps around the school looking like a bona fide porn star, the red "A" always emblazoned on a breast. "I just realized something," she says to a boy Rhiannon is talking to, "my name is an anagram for 'I Love'." He doesn't know what an anagram is. Heh.

As her parents, Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson exude the image of having entirely too much fun in the roles. They're frequently compared to Juno's, unfairly, I think, the only real similarities being their intelligence and unwavering support for a daughter while retaining their ability to snark. "No judgment," the mother opines, "but you look like a stripper." "A high-paid stripper," the father amends, "like for governors and athletes, but a stripper nonetheless." They're a little piece of perfect, particularly the mother, who understands the complexities of her daughter's situation far better than even Olive would care to hear. Any time you can watch a complicated teen girl interact with their parents and your first thought is "Ah, I see where she gets it from now", the movie has done its job well.

In addition to Malcolm McDowell, who plays the principal as a straight-up asshat (refreshing in its own way, to be sure), the other notable adults in the movie are Thomas Haden Church, as Olive's favorite teacher, and Lisa Kudrow as his wife the guidance councilor, who notes "I should know every girl in the school, particularly the ones dressed like prostitutes" when she encounters Olive and doesn't recognize her. Their presence takes unexpected turns that I will not reveal, but that keep the movie fresh, interesting, and still funny even when it delves into more serious territory.

Outshining them all is Emma Stone, as Olive, who carries the movie on her lovely shoulders, in a performance that should cement her as a star. She masks her character's vulnerability, making it clear without miming it in the slightest, and effortlessly breezes her way through very complex dialogue sequences without ever making it seem like she's reading memorized lines from a script. She plays intelligent so well that I'm not sure she could do stupid (even her supporting character in "Superbad" seemed more intelligent than she was probably written, now that I think on it). That's actually quite a compliment in my book. I don't think Jodie Foster can do stupid, either.

I also liked that neither Marianne nor Rhiannon played quite the role I expected. Rhiannon in particular seems relegated to the role of the heroine's snarky BFF - Jane to her Daria, Rebecca to her Enid, Leah to her Juno - but the movie takes a different tack, and soon she's holding the picket signs with the rest of the crowd (the distinct possibility that she desires more than friendship with Olive is not lost to the discerning viewer, either). Marianne appears at first to be the standard-issue Jesus Freak antagonist, but the movie explores her motivations with more lucidity than most, and in the end we can conclude that she's more of a well-intentioned extremist who genuinely wants to help Olive but only knows the One Way.

The movie's biggest weakness, by far, is in the development of its romance angle, which comes kind of out of left field, and which would be fine except for the fact that it seems to want us to accept it as more than it reasonably should be. Suffice to say that I believed that Todd was a very nice guy, but didn't believe a girl as smart as Olive would describe him as so much more.

That's such a small facet of what the movie is about, though, that it doesn't even really damage it, and there's so much more here than in not just so many High School comedies, but so many more ostensibly serious movies altogether, that it would be tragic to miss out on it because of its marketing category. "Easy A" earns its grade and its adjective.

Rating: ***1/2

Notes:

- There's an undercurrent of the exploration of the culture of trash celebrity here, but a Snookie reference seemed too meta.

- The scene where Olive is being picketed, and all she can think of is disappointment at the apparent lack of effort put into the signs, is reminiscent of Kevin Smith telling the story of how he attended a protest of his own movie "Dogma." There's no way that story wasn't a reference. It's a freaking hilarious story and should definitely be checked out on YouTube.

- Marianne holds her "Cross Your Heart Club" meeting at "Libby Park", an obvious shout-out to TV Tropes (look up "The Libby").

- The movie was originally written as a hard R, but the transition to PG-13 is less glaring than you'd think. I wouldn't say it's appropriate for most 13-year-olds - the discussion of sex is particularly frank and straightforward - though it should be a welcome choice for anyone older than that. There's enough Emma Stone eye candy not to be bored, but the movie probably gets away with more than most because it actually, you know, has a point.

- Best (only?) brick joke in cinematic history involving "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

- Best laugh resultant from a ring tone in cinematic history as well, though that's obviously a pretty new category.

- It's been wrongly lumped into the category of High School-themed "remakes" of more classic stuff, in this case obviously "The Scarlet Letter". Olive is inspired by Hester Prynne, and puts the red "A" on her blouses, but there isn't much more to the comparison than that, really. "Easy A" is better than "The Scarlet Letter" anyway; I've always considered it by far to be the most overrated of the "classics" they make you read in High School.

- The movie's trailer is ghastly, and makes it seem like a garden-variety PG-13 "American Pie" wannabe High School sexcom. It ain't, not by a long shot. In a stroke of marketing genius, though, the studio put the first ten minutes of the movie up for free on YouTube, which did a much better job of selling the movie to me than the trailer ever could have. Given that the movie did very good business (cost ~$8M, grossed close to 70), I expect that tactic to gain ground in the future.