Booksmart (Review)
Booksmart is this Generation’s The Breakfast Club.
I don’t care what you’re doing. Stop and go see Booksmart!
Well, finish reading this review first and then race off to see it.
I had heard good things about the new coming of age film, Booksmart, so I was prepared for it to be better than your average teen comedy. I was not expecting it to be one of the most brilliant comedies I have ever seen. It manages to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of millennial culture and translates it flawlessly into one of the most compelling movies I’ve seen in years. There were points in this film where I was almost concerned for my own well being because I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe. If there is one film that you need to see in theaters this year, well, that’s probably Avengers: Endgame (which you’ve hopefully already seen). However, Booksmart is a close second.
Booksmart sets the tone early by introducing us to two gloriously insufferable protagonists Amy and Molly, played by Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein. The two start the film celebrating the fact that they spent their high school careers working hard and forgoing social lives, all so they could outshine their loser peers by getting into incredible colleges. Molly especially has a strong sense of superiority that allows her to look down on her peers like peasants from her academic tower. That smugness though is short lived as she discovers that these supposed simpletons also managed to get into top-rated schools while still having time to, well, have lives. This sends Molly spiraling into a full-on crisis until she decides that she and Amy should spend their last night in high school making up for lost time by partying hard. The problem is that the two soon find themselves in over their heads when it becomes clear that they’re book smart and not street smart.
Everything about Booksmart falls into place perfectly. Writers Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, and Katie Silberman (who also wrote Isn’t It Romantic earlier this year) craft a full-blown masterpiece that manages to give audiences plenty of moments to laugh at and also a strong case of the feels. The journey they put the two leads through manages to take the two from pretentious, off-putting jerks to loveable gals that you can’t help but root for by the end. Their friendship is easily one of the most well crafted “womances” (female version of a bromance) I’ve ever seen on the big screen. More importantly, Booksmart gave me flashbacks to my high school days because I knew people exactly like the characters in this film. The writers manage to faultlessly create these three-dimensional characters that feel incredibly genuine and sprinkle them throughout the film. As crazy as the antics get, they’re never so over the top that they take away from the journey the two leads face on their (first) night of debauchery.
A good script is great, but so often a bad director can just muck it all up. Luckily, Olivia Wilde proves with Booksmart that she is far from a bad director. I would call her approach to the film nothing short of pure genius. It would have been easy to let Booksmart devolve into another cliche riddled teen comedy that we’ve all seen too many times to count. Instead, she focuses on the details that make the film so outstanding. Wilde knows that in order to make her characters really exceptional, they can’t outshine all the other characters in the movie and so she gives every one of them a chance in the spotlight and leave an impression. This is particularly important because of the major underlying theme of the film which is not to judge a book by its cover. At first glance, all the characters seem like they might be convenient stereotypes, but throughout the film, we learn that there is so much more to all of them. The jock who all the hot girls love only likes goofy and laid back girls. The supposed slut is actually a third wave feminist who got a 1560 on her SATs. The rich boy who tries too hard to buy friends actually loves musicals. This might be a moral we’ve seen time and time again, but Booksmart does it so well that I think John Hughes could even stand to take a few notes from it.
The piece de resistance though are the two leads themselves. Dever and Feldstein share some of the best chemistry I may have ever seen on the big screen. Both breath such incredible life into their roles that I found myself hating them and loving them at the same time. Sure, they’re kinda assholes at first but, by the film’s end they’ve realized that and are better people for it. The two have appeared in a few feature films before such as Lady Bird, The Front Runner, and Beautiful Boy, but their performances in Booksmart will hopefully catapult them into full-blown stardom as two of the funniest leading ladies in the industry. I found myself completely enthralled with them as they did their unique and complex characters justice. Without them, I doubt Booksmart would have been even half as good.
Honestly, Booksmart is probably my favorite movie of 2019 so far. Looking back I can’t find a single thing I disliked about the movie (other than the things I was supposed to). It’s nothing short of genius and I cannot recommend it highly enough. As soon as I left the theaters I let every one of my friends know that they had to go see Booksmart as soon as possible. Now I’m letting you know. Seriously, it’s important that you do because I want this movie to be as successful as possible. Why? Because I watch movies every week and if Booksmart makes a ton of money then I might be lucky enough to see more movies like this in the future.
