Good Actors AttemptingTo Overcome a Substandard Script

Rating: 6/10 (18 January 2019)

1 March 2011. Reminiscent of the teen classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) in attitude, character, and voice-over, this teen comedy adds creative credit design with a little of a cinematic side trips of 500 Days of Summer (2009). But in this version, the audience gets to see how a Ferris might have been created from the lie of an Emma Stone. The script, however, seems to desperately focus on getting its laughs from exaggerated opposites (school mascot) and other over the top attempts for laughs that seem to break from the more fascinating authentic fantasy (as if more makes for is better). In some ways, it would have been intriguing if this movie had tried for serious teen drama instead in capturing the teen audience instead of skirting around the issue using comedy and exaggerating humor, almost making light of a real bullying issue.
By 12 minutes into the movie the one-liners are coming quick and fast, almost at an nauseating, unbelievable pace. Even the public school principal (Malcolm McDowell) is given dialogue most stuffily unreal and almost like a throwback to the 50s. The use of the word "t" later is also overdone and the word "twit" doesn't seem to even be a problem. What is even more scary, though, is the possibility that the dialogue, at least for the student might actually resonant with the audience (presumably of roughly the same chronologically the same age) may truly think and speak constantly this way in high school (it's been that long) in which case this movie might be more in tune and better than I can give it credit for). Could it be? Hopefully not. An even more challenging and pertinent question is whether the movie industry creates the culture of teen dialogue or only reflects it. Is the dialogue and speech being depicted in this movie portraying what teens really get into or is it getting teens into the depicted, really "bad" language and speech patterns? "A boy in the room" parent scene continues the overly, exaggerated, and over the top, unreal dialogue that supposedly captures and identifies with the younger generation but that really diminishes the more serious and believable aspects of this movie focusing on some real teen issues, taking the easy way out of having to develop a script that is finely nuanced with both appealing humor and drama. Shortly afterwards, in one of the movie's strongest scenes that starts out pretty lame, but then Brandon's plea becomes a rather emotionally captivating speech that connects to the real human condition, even though the somewhat forced, script device of using lies continues to teeter on unbelievability.
The fakeness of this movie is increased by the obviously impossible swimming pool scene in a house and teen partiers that could only be achieve in a larger, more urban/suburb upperclass venue of a movie, not the small town depicted in this movie. The bed room scene is also riddled with clichés and overtly ridiculous phases almost pandering to the audience, descending almost to raunchy humor. A more sophisticated sex scene that has nice undertones of humor occurs in THE COOLER with William C. Macy and Maria Bello having a loud romp.
Towards the middle of the movie, the more serious elements of the teen condition come into better clarity, balancing the more ridiculous performances to date as our prima dona becomes more aware of others than herself. The accompanying scenes though really maintain, though with less frantic effort, the pace of tolerable humor while only briefly skirting the ridiculous. tapping into a contemporary John Hughe's wannabee.
The counselor scene while perhaps intellectually revealing also is very suspect for its portrayal of guidance counselors especially just the immediately proceeding scene its very clear that the counselor was informed of that was really going on, just adding inconsistency the weaknesses of the script. Even when there's a great opportunity such as the post-counselor scene to really rise above the fluffy, pretentious pseudo-teen humor, the script-writer blows it and misses a truly bonding, relational, meaningful moment of opposite-contentious-bonding in a human way.
Past the midway point, the real conflict and sexual lies that create real tension finally come out and make for a much more revealing, valuable, and worthwhile, meaningful movie experience. Then with our heroine's real date, there is a severe underdevelopment of her date's character to this point so that the inter-character dynamics of almost every other similar movie genre is missing.
Unfortunately for the tone of this movie, the big dramatic moment is so disrupting to the overall movie's background mood that it's too radical a departure from unreal fantasy to harsh, dramatic movie drama. While the movie seems to settle down, the movie never really gets to go to the depth and intensity that the social issue that the movie raises because the movie never really takes its subject seriously enough but only uses it as a vehicle to appear sophisticated and "cool." What is remarkable about this movie is that it's not exactly obvious that the problem with this movie is the actors. It's remarkable perhaps is that this is a movie about a script that really doesn't do justice to the great actors in the movie, because despite the script, there is a sincere effort to make the best of it and sometimes it shows through.