The Intelligent Teen Movie

This was written in November 2010:

A recent Empire review gave teen flick Easy A a rare four star rating, putting it up in the heights of such films as Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Mean Girls. Now I am a self-confessed lover of these films, they display wit, sass, intelligence, innocence, and enough cheese and romance to keep it light for teenagers to understand, mostly. Easy A is no exception to this rule and it also, like Clueless and Mean Girls, has a lead actress worthy of future stardom. One can only hope Emma Stone fulfils expectation and does not fall into the obscurity of Alicia Silverstone or the drug addled and frankly bizarre world of Lindsay Lohan.
Easy A is funny, touching, incredibly intelligent, and also boasts a supporting cast of world class actors such as Stanley Tucci (a fabulous man who I place in the same category as Johnny Depp for acting ability) and Thomas Haden Church (if you haven’t seen Sideways – why not?). But it is our lead who provides focus and interest in both her demeanour and story. Emma Stone is a star in the making, not many people can be so engaging that even though she makes idiotic decisions you are rooting for her throughout. That is the fundamental difference between Stone and Lohan (Mean Girls), because although Lohan’s character gets sucked into the twisted world of cliques and high school bitch contests there is something about her that makes you want her to, at the very least, NOT get the guy. Lohan, like Stone, benefits from great support; Neil Flynn as the father, Tina Fey (also the writer) as the put upon math teacher, and not forgetting her rival Regina played by Rachel McAdams. However Emma Stone is pretty much on her own the entire movie, we hear her narration, see her talk directly to camera, and the supporting cast is just that, support. They come and go when Olive needs advice from her parents (Tucci and the brilliant Patricia Clarkson), a student to beg for her help or judge her, and a teacher to bring the source material for the film to the fore.
Said material is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I have yet to read this book but it’s on its way from Amazon. The story concerns a woman who is branded an adulterer by her peers by having a red coloured ‘A’ sewn onto her clothing, which our heroine of Easy A adopts as a badge of honour for being a supposed slut. Clueless is based on the Austen classic Emma, and for a modern adaptation is incredibly accurate. 10 Things I Hate About You is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, one of my favourite plays that I studied in depth at college, and although the movie is not going for accuracy it does explore the themes of sibling rivalry and courtship incredibly well. Mean Girls is an original creation by Tina Fey (who also writes and stars in 30 Rock) and Fey is wacky enough to have been able to create a teen flick that is neither mundane nor too formulaic. Of course there is the usual happy end, girl gets guy, everyone finds their place in the world as happens in all the movies in this article, but unlike the relentless Bring It On series or similar there is a convincing storyline, engaging characters you want to come out on top and not suddenly see the film become a prom slasher flick just to get rid of everyone annoying on screen.
As far as I can work out without having read the source material is that Bert V. Royal (what a name eh?) has written around the Scarlet Letter, using the ideas of persecution for a relatively harmless crime as opposed to making Olive an actual slut who gets paid to have sex rather than just to say she had it. The way the school, and even her best friend, turn on Olive is scary, yet she uses the A and a provocative new wardrobe to enhance her standing as an all-out hoe-bag, because she has been the ignored teenager her whole high school career. The film deals in its way with Christian fundamentalism, as religion appears to have been a major factor in the persecution of Hester in the Puritan world she lived, her only crime falling in love while her husband was believed to be lost at sea. Olive is faced with an actually pretty scary Christian in the shape of Amanda Byrnes, and there is no room for question or doubt in the existence of heaven or hell as Olive finds when talking to a pastor. So Olive is left without religion to guide her, just her wit and a rather attractive young man played by Penn Badgley (of Gossip Girl fame) save her from continual torment from her peers. This is a clever movie with an engaging lead that does not come across conceited, dealing with issues that will fly over the head of most of its audience, but caught by a few.
An intelligent piece of film making is a rare thing, more so in the world of teen movies. The eighties had John Hughes pioneering this world of the teenager, that they read and can speak in full sentences, often sounding pretentious beyond belief. But Hughes instilled a romance in these movies too, so when Olive cries out that she wants her life to be like an eighties movie I can totally relate, because who wouldn’t want the boy they always had a crush on to stand outside their house blasting suitably cheesy music as a declaration of love? And why can’t we all have a completely random musical number just for the sheer hell of it? Of course not everyone can sing so this idea could be potentially disastrous, but I love that teen movies now use the examples of old teen movies to show what they want their lives to be like.
Safe to say I enjoyed Easy A a great deal, I just hope that tragedy will not be a factor in the future of its stars. What I mean here is that Clueless now has the tag of being Brittany Murphy’s breakout movie, same goes for Heath Ledger in 10 Things. Both were tragic deaths, far too early in such promising careers. Heath would have won an Oscar eventually I am sure, and Brittany would have continued making the cute rom-coms intermittently with the movies that critics approved of such as 8 Mile and Girl, Interrupted. Lohan is another tragedy entirely, someone who was on the brink of being able to go for any role she wanted, but who has let drugs take over and her talent reduced to TV movies once in a blue moon (see Labour Pains, actually don’t see it, just take my word as gospel). If in 10 years’ time Emma Stone or Penn Badgley are washed up, drug addled, or even worse dead, I will be so sorry, and look at my copy of Easy A with the same regret as I look at these other movies.
Easy A is a film I want for my shelf because I firmly believe this film, like the other stand out teen movies I have mentioned, has a message that will not get old nor will I get sick of hearing it, that it’s okay to be different, more than that it’s okay to be completely and utterly normal.