It's been almost exactly a year since our last Snap Judgment! We are horrendously overdue for just such a treat.
Let's talk about "Booksmart" (2019)!
- The odds are stacked against it.
"Booksmart" (2019) could by all rights have been a classic (read: boringly predictable) teensploitation movie in the grand tradition of "Breakfast Club" (1985), "She's All That" (1999), and most pointedly last-hurrah-rager-party movies like "Can't Hardly Wait" (1998) and "Superbad" (2007). To up the level of challenge, the film even follows a pretty standard story arc from last day of school through circuitous-and-wacky-journey-to-party to actual party to party aftermath.
- ...Which makes it ever more the delight!
Given the well-worn territory it treads, "Booksmart" could have been a truly unremarkable movie.
And yet! It is one of the most entertaining, charming, fresh, and innovative comedies I've seen in a while! First and perhaps most importantly, it is genuinely funny. Its many pit stops in the journey-to-party are fun tangents when they could be tiresome and laborious delayings-of-the-inevitable-arrival at THE party. Even the closing credits are eminently watchable.
- The movie is intersectionally feminist and this only makes it awesomer (duh).
I love it when a movie proves that you can be repeatedly laugh-out-loud, inventively funny by NOT relying on cheap, predictable, punching-down jokes. It's only in retrospect that you notice the jokes that weren't made, because you sure as hell don't miss them.
- Great performances partner with a wonderfully humanist ethos.
It's not easy to pull off across-the-board solid performances in a film with a large ensemble cast, but "Booksmart" demonstrates it can be done! The main characters of Amy and Molly (as portrayed by Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, respectively) are extremely fun and compelling to watch, especially as they navigate fluctuations in their confidence in themselves and in their friendship. Minor characters like Gigi (played by Billie Lourd), Theo (Eduardo Franco), Alan (Austin Crute), Miss Fine (Jessica Williams!!), and especially George (Noah Galvin) enrich and fully round out the story.
With such a wide cast of characters, it is truly noteworthy that "Booksmart" resists falling into the common-in-teensploitation-movies trap of moralizing and judging about "good" and "bad" people. While many characters in the movie certainly encounter minor yet survivable humiliations, these serve only to further humanize them rather than serve them their just desserts.
Instead, in Vonnegut-esque style, every person in "Booksmart" matters. By the end of the movie, you understand that every single one of the characters in "Booksmart" is a valuable, redeemable, complex human being. This only deepens the enjoyment of the movie, because it lacks in mean-spirited schadenfreude and instead introduces you to a range of characters, each of whom you get to know and enjoy.
- And finally: Olivia Wilde!!
Taking all these components into account, it is perhaps not surprising that I gave "Booksmart" a 5.
...Incidentally, this has nothing to do with the fact that Husband's first comment before we even left the theater was, "You're going to give this a 5, right?"
I strongly recommend that you find "Booksmart" quick before it's out of theaters!
{Heart}
