by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime
“world premiere” was something called Perfect High — note the absence of a definite article — written
not by Christine Conradt but
by Anne-Marie Hess and directed by Vanessa Parise, whose work I’d previously
seen on the Lifetime movie #popFan (though this time she’s blessedly without the Twitter-style hashtag in
front of her credit) but seemed to me to do a considerably better job here. It
helped that she had stronger material; though on one level Perfect High (a marvelously punning title representing the
“perfect” high school the protagonists attend — it’s called “Spectrum High” and
its walls are done in rainbow-flag colors; in the U.S. a high school so
decorated would probably be one of those ones specially set aside for Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual and Transgender students who were being so severely bullied they
would need a special school where they could feel safe enough to concentrate on
schoolwork and learn anything at all. Here in Canada, though it’s a bit unclear
whether this time Canada is playing itself in a Lifetime movie or standing in
for the U.S., it’s apparent that this is a regular large high school — and it’s
big enough that it has a dance ensemble called the “Rhythm Chasers” that’s
about to audition for a hugely important TV series called “Talent Scout.” The
star of the troupe is Amanda (Bella Thorne), a nice white girl with blonde hair
and the usual Lifetime dysfunctional family: her dad works for a company that
has just been acquired by another one and is worried that this will mean he’ll
be laid off; her mom is a stay-at-home housewife with a particular horror of
her kids falling prey to illegal “drugs,” and her younger brother Robbie (Ryan
Grantham, who on the basis of his appearance here is someone I would expect to
be very hot when he gets older)
has been diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin. During a game in the lavishly
equipped Spectrum High gym where the Rhythm Chasers are performing as an
opening act and a modern-day substitute for cheerleaders, Amanda lands wrong
after one of her leaps and injures her leg. For this she’s hospitalized briefly
and sent home with a prescription for hydrocodone, the generic form of
Oxycontin, and like such classic-era stars as Lionel Barrymore, Bela Lugosi and
Edith Piaf, she starts using opiates medicinally but soon ends up addicted.
In
her descent into drug-movie perdition Amanda naturally has the help of some of
her high-school friends, including the vaguely Asian-looking Nate (Ross
Butler), his sort-of girlfriend Riley (Daniela Bobadilla), and Carson (Israel
Broussard, a bay-faced twink whom I found hot as hell even though he’s not my
usual “type” — between Israel Broussard and Ryan Grantham this movie is a
treasure trove of potential male sex symbols of the future!), an aspiring
filmmaker who alone of Amanda’s friends shares her taste for classic old movies
instead of stuff like The Night of the Living Dead. In one chilling scene Amanda shows up for a party
with these three and they offer her booze, and when she points out that her
doctor has warned her alcohol and her meds don’t mix, the other three say
they’re all on something psychoactive
and they drink all the time and don’t believe the warnings. Soon Amanda
develops enough of a habit that she starts losing her coordination — there’s no
sign of these “high school students” actually attending classes, but we see
Amanda’s growing loss of control in her dance rehearsals, in particular her
inability to keep up with the rest of the troupe and the slowness and
clumsiness that creeps into her performances. Also Amanda’s habit gets too big
for her official prescriptions to fill, so she and her friends start seeing a
dope dealer — and when they can no longer afford official “prescription” drugs,
their dealer starts giving them packets of stuff he says is Mexican
hydrocodone, ground up into a powder for sniffing. What it really is is heroin — though even before this Amanda has
seen some of her fellow stoners at parties smoking heroin by laying it on
tinfoil, lighting a flame under it and snorting the smoke — and at the same
party Amanda has seen Carson sneaking off with a former girlfriend just after
he and Amanda had had sex for the first time. Amanda finally hits bottom when
Riley overdoses — the four are in a car together and Carson is driving, and he
doesn’t want to go to a hospital at first for fear they’ll be busted, but
ultimately he relents and drives to the nearest E.R., but too late to save
Riley’s life. But even that doesn’t stop the remaining trio from using; in one particularly
pathetic scene (after Riley had stolen the money from Amanda’s fellow dancers
to pay for her fatal fix and set it up in a way that Amanda would be blamed —
all this after Amanda was finally fired from the dance troupe for being too
stoned all the time to perform) she and Carson are begging their dealer for drugs
they don’t have the money to pay for. The dealer says he’ll give them the drugs
if Carson will pimp out Amanda to another guy in exchange — and Amanda is finally horrified enough to dump Carson and confess to her
parents that she needs “help.” In some ways Perfect High is your usual clichéd high-school drug movie — I
can remember seeing vaguely similar stories on the ABC Afterschool Special when I was the age of this film’s protagonists — but it has a couple of
modern-day wrinkles that make it a fascinating index of how much attitudes have
changed between then and now.
One is the sheer ubiquity of legal drugs; it seems that until the very end, every
time Amanda’s parents or the school authorities notice that something is wrong
with her, they take her to a therapist — only instead of actually talking to her about what might be going on with her life,
the “therapist” merely reaches for his or her prescription pad and writes her a
prescription from some other drug. In the 1960’s, when I was growing up, there was
still a line of sorts between medical drugs and recreational drugs — though the
line was blurring since tranquilizers had been widely introduced in the 1950’s
and were being widely prescribed, especially to women using them to cope with
what Betty Friedan called “the problem with no name.” (Ironically, while they
themselves were heavy-duty users of illegal recreationals, the Rolling Stones
were also recording songs like “Mother’s Little Helper” calling the older
generation on its hypocrisy for damning young people for drug use while
themselves consuming mind-altering substances and declaring their drugs “O.K.” because they came in amber bottles
with doctors’ names on them.) With all Amanda’s friends on one medically
prescribed drug or another, with her brother on Ritalin (in one scene she
nervously fingers his bottle of it and wonders what new exciting high it would
give her) and with “therapy” having
disintegrated into just another, albeit legal, form of pill-pushing, it’s no
wonder she doesn’t think “drugs” are a big deal — though she’s still heard
enough stories of the Big Bad H to be shocked and disgusted when she finds out
she’s been using, and become addicted to, heroin without even knowing it. (When
she texts the dealer asking if the “Mexican hydrocodone” is really heroin, he
texts back, “I thought you knew.”) The other thing that makes this movie a
snapshot of 2015 instead of the late 1960’s is the teen characters’ heavy use
of social media; though the script shied back from using actual names like Facebook
or Twitter, the screen is filled with reports and photos the kids are texting
each other, and social-media posts are used to tell us exactly what Amanda’s
friends and acquaintances think of her and just where she is in the school’s
pecking order. Indeed, the kids themselves are so obvious about what they post
that if their parents logged on to social-media sites themselves they could
trace what their kids are doing pharmacologically, socially and even sexually
without having either to confront them or physically spy.
There’s something to
the argument made by defenders of the NSA’s spying program that they’re not
collecting any more information than people, especially young people who’ve
grown up with the Internet and think social-media “sharing” is second nature,
are voluntarily putting up on the Net for anyone with the right social-media
accounts to see. (And these things are increasingly coming back to bite the
posters; employers today routinely do social-media searches of potential
employees, and people are losing out on jobs because embarrassing footage of
themselves doing drugs, sex, graffiti, vandalism or other forms of youth
rebellion are turning up on the Internet years after they were posted — and
often, I suspect, after the people who posted them have forgotten about them.)
I did ask myself whether we kids
who went to high school in the late 1960’s would have been so forthcoming with
details about our lives on social media and the Internet if these had existed
yet, and my guess is that we were proud enough of our “rebel” streaks we
probably would have (even though my Facebook posts from the 1960’s, had
Facebook existed then, would if anything have probably been even duller than my
Facebook posts today). I quite liked Perfect High as a movie, especially since director Parise
(working with much stronger and more compelling material than she had on #popFan) and writer Hess don’t adopt the lab-rat
detachment of so many of today’s filmmakers; instead they really make us care
about the characters and indeed make us (make me, anyway), want to walk into
the screen and tell them to stop being such nitwits — and that goes not only
for the high-school kids but the authority figures who keep writing them
prescriptions; when one more “counselor” or “therapist” reached for a
prescription pad, I kept wanting to yell at them, “Idiot! The last thing Amanda needs is more drugs!” And as much fun as it was to watch
the cute guys in this film, in all fairness the acting honors are taken by
Bella Thorne as Amanda — even though, according to an imdb.com post, she was
cast at the last minute after all the other roles were filled: caught between
intensely anti-drug parents (she knows that because, in a flashback, we’ve seen
them come down on her brother mercilessly for having tried marijuana) and an
alienating school situation in which drug users are really her only friends,
she’s over-the-charts alienated even for the central character in a modern-day
teen movie — and Thorne nails the character’s shifting moods and deep conflicts
in a performance that I hope marks her for biggers and betters.
