Booksmart (2019)

Film: Booksmart (2019)
Stars: Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever, Jessica Williams, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte, Jason Sudeikis
Director: Olivia Wilde
Oscar History: Feldstein scored a Globe nomination, but no luck with Oscar.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

There are few rite-of-passage films quite like the "life in modern-day high school" film trope.  It's something that virtually every generation has.  Everything from Mean Girls to Clueless to The Breakfast Club to American Graffiti to Rebel Without a Cause.  You think that it started with James Dean, you're wrong: look at someone like Joyce Reynolds in Janie a decade before Dean was being torn apart on the big-screen-the high school film has been important to American cinema for as long as teenagers have flocked to the movies.  It'd been a couple of years since we'd seen a film that tried to be the "Gen Z" version of such a story, and so it makes sense that Booksmart came forward, and as luck would have it it did so with two of the more promising young actresses of their generation, Kaitlyn Dever & Beanie Feldstein, not yet "too famous" to play a high schooler and yet big enough celebrities to get the picture greenlit.  So what do they (and director Olivia Wilde) have to say about the modern-day high school experience?  Let's find out, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on two seniors Molly (Feldstein) and Amy (Dever), forever best friends, and two people that embrace their outsider status.  Amy is a lesbian, trying to find a way to speak to her crush, while Molly is more intent on embracing her "I'm going to Yale" pedigree and rubbing it in the faces of her classmates.  This backfires for her when she realizes that she spent all of high school studying and getting good grades, and yet her classmates who slacked off, had sex, and went to parties still got into prestigious universities.  She and Amy make a pact to go out and get crazy on their last night before graduation, and in the process end up at a variety of parties, having a fight that threatens their friendship, and then making up before Amy goes off to Botswana for a gap year.

The movie is funny, genuinely funny.  There are recurring bits of Amy & Molly over-complimenting each other, or Noah Galvin (recovered from his time in The Real O'Neals and that tragically bad interview that threatened to end his career) being overly dramatic with the theater kids (the film's best sequence is his Eyes Wide Shut-inspired murder mystery party).  Wilde doesn't rely on anti-feminist tropes to make her plot work-she has Amy & Molly genuinely support and love each other, and when they do fight it feels organic and not just a lazy male director assuming all women will fight over men or their shared ambitions.  In this way, Booksmart distinguishes itself from many of its predecessors.

The problem is, that's pretty much the only way it does.  The film's graduation sequence is laughably cliched, and the movie doesn't really have anything new to say about the high school experience.  Update the clothes, music, and technology, and this could just as easily be Clueless or Mean Girls or Pretty in Pink.  I get why this genre is never going to die (all new generations want to see themselves onscreen, not realizing that Jim Stark and Ben Braddock and Andie Walsh are them), but is it really possible that no one has any new plots to give us when it comes to the high school experience?  This is as good as can be expected with such well-trod territory, but it starts to drag when you realize you've seen it dozens of times before.