by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Easy A, a DVD I picked out of the backlog out of sheer
desperation — I didn’t want anything too “dark” or action-oriented that might
not be Charles’ cup of tea. I was looking for “light,” and I got it: a 2010
comedy that proved to be surprisingly good. I got this out of the really cheap table at Target one day when I was there
looking for more prestigious entertainments, and I grabbed it thinking it was a
Lifetime-like story about a high-school teacher accused of giving one of his
nubile young female students easy A’s in exchange for sex from her. It turned
out to be something completely different: set (and filmed) in Ojai, California,
it’s about high-school wallflower Olive Prenderghast (Emma Stone, showing the
promise she’s since fulfilled big-time) — she’s so “invisible to the opposite
sex” she complains, “If Google Earth were a guy, he couldn’t find me if I was
dressed up as a 10-story building.” At one point, in the middle of girl talk
with her best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka), she decides to invent a made-up
tryst between herself and a community-college student who’s a friend of her
older brother (whom we never see, though we do see her younger — adoptive — brother, a Black kid
who pisses off Olive’s parents when he reveals that he knows he’s adopted). Things snowball and she becomes the
latest gossip victim, with her sexual exploits becoming the talk of the student
body and boys who’ve never noticed or said word one to her before suddenly
coming up to her in hopes that if she “put out” for that nameless college guy,
she’ll do it with them as well. By chance, she’s in an English literature class
with her favorite teacher, Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), and they happen
to be reading The Scarlet Letter.
Olive takes her cue from the book (and from the 1926 silent film version
directed by Victor Sjoström and starring Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson): first
she goes to a party hosted by the school’s most popular girl, Melody Bostic
(Johanna Broddy), and takes her “Kinsey-six” Gay friend Brandon (Dan Byrd) into
a back room, where she fakes having sex with him — including punching him in
the crotch to get him to moan like he’s having an orgasm. This not only boosts
her already burgeoning reputation as a slut, it gets the school bullies off his back by making people think he’s really straight.
Then Olive sews a scarlet “A” and puts it on her clothes, like Hester Prynne
was forced to do in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, and sets up a racket by which,
in exchange for gift certificates at local restaurants and stores, she’ll allow
the other boys in school to say
they had sex with her even though they didn’t. One of her “customers” is a
heavy-set (but not altogether unattractive: he’d do well at a Bears event) guy
named Evan (Jameson Moss), who’s so persistent with her I couldn’t resist
joking, “He’s going to grow up to be Harvey Weinstein.” Another is Anson (Jake
Sandvig), who takes her on a date at the local lobster restaurant but makes it
clear he expects actual sex from her for his actual investment. By chance, Todd
(Penn Badgley), the boy Olive really
has a crush on — and has had
since the eighth grade, when she wanted him to kiss her and he drew back (a
scene which at first made me thing screenwriter Bert V. Royal was going to make
him the Gay one, but no such
luck) — happens to work at the
lobster restaurant, and he agrees to take her home (but no more than that!)
after Anson strands her there. Olive’s antics also attract the ire of the
school’s Christian group, headed by Marianne (a nice comic-bitch performance by
Amanda Byrnes) and her guitar-playing boyfriend Micah (Cam Gigandet), who’s 22
years old but has been held back from graduation four times because he can’t
pass any of the tests. It turns out Micah has been messing around for real with
Mrs. Griffith (Lisa Kudrow), school guidance counselor and wife of Olive’s
favorite teacher, and she’s given him chlamydia — which of course he blames on
Olive.
Ironically, given her imaginary tryst with Brandon, both Olive’s parents turn out to be Bisexual: her dad, on
hearing that his daughter is dating a Gay man, says, “I was Gay once,” and her
mom later confesses to Olive that in her own high-school days she was the school slut, “mostly with men.” Indeed, Easy
A is a quite literate film in its
quirkiness and kinkiness; though the original script was heavily edited to keep
it at a PG-13 rating, writer Royal and director Will Gluck fill the movie with
marvelously quirky bits and as many “plants” as the best-constructed movies of
the 1930’s: at one point Olive blurts out that the only book she’s read in high
school that hasn’t had an
analogue to her life or that of anyone she knows is Huckleberry Finn — “’cause I don’t know any teenage boys who have
ever run away with a big, hulking Black guy” — and at the end her Gay friend
Brandon does run away with a big,
hulking Black guy (and we get a glimpse of them in a bed together watching the
1938 film of Huckleberry Finn
with Mickey Rooney, and the actor playing Jim telling him, “I likes steering” —
for once in a Hollywood movie we actually see a Gay character with another man
in bed!!! And though the actor playing Brandon’s boyfriend isn’t quite as big,
hulking or Black as the script hints, he’s quite enough of those to thrill me
and appeal to my fantasies!). Easy
A is one of that handful of recent movies,
like Little Miss Sunshine, Stranger than Fiction and Kabluey, that convinces me that movie comedy isn’t entirely a lost art: for the most part it’s a delightful
film, making some social comments about the power of rumor and the bizarreness
of the whole concept of social media — and it’s also ironic that as the
school’s hard-nosed principal director Gluck cast Malcolm McDowell, who got his
start in the 1968 film “If … ”,
in which he played a high-school rebel who led his classmates in an occupation
of the boarding school they attended!
