Easy A

"John Hughes did not direct my life," says Olive Pendergast, played by Emma Stone, in Easy A. This is true. Unfortunately, her life has been directed by Will Gluck, without any discernible visual style. But there are plenty of references to John Hughes films--there are even clips from them. This is almost always a bad idea, as it reminds people of better movies. If you show me a clip of Ferris Bueller's Day Off I'm only going to wish I was watching that movie instead of this one.

Easy A would like to be a modern Hughes film, but it's lacking. It gets off to a bad start with plot points that don't add up. Stone, to get out of going camping with her best friend's family, lies about having a date. Then, when her friend asks her if they "did it," Stone, for no apparent reason, says they did. She is overheard by the school's religious zealot (Amanda Bynes), and all of a sudden the students are looking at her differently. This just doesn't make sense--Stone told us she's almost anonymous at the school, and it's highly unlikely that in the year 2010, in an age when it's common for middle-school kids to be having oral sex, that one anonymous girl losing her virginity would be a cause celebre.

This threw me off for a while, and I struggled to get with the flow of the film. It didn't help that the school didn't seem authentic--it was a movie school, peopled not by real kids but types. Stone's parents, the fine actors Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, were twinkly folks who also didn't seem authentic, and the school principal was oddly portrayed by Malcolm McDowell, who seemed to have wandered in from another movie.

The film does start to right its ship about halfway in, when Stone starts a small business of letting guys say they slept with her, though they didn't. She's paid in store gift-cards, or, in one case, a coupon to Bed, Bath & Beyond. She embraces her increasingly bad reputation by wearing a red A on her hooker outfits (the class is studying The Scarlet Letter, wouldn't you know, but she's not committing adultery--shouldn't she wear an F for fornication?). But the rumors intensify, especially when Bynes' Jesus freak boyfriend comes down with chlamydia. This creates an opportunity for the movie's funniest line, when the boy is shipped off to his grandparents: "The only thing worse than chlamydia is Florida."

All of this might have worked in a film that was set in a time period when the sexualization of teenage girls wasn't common. But, I think the filmmakers wanted to make a point about the spreading of rumors on social networking sites, but this is only skimmed, and it doesn't get terribly serious. The film does have a message for young girls, if they look hard enough. Interestingly the script is pretty hard on the religious kids, painting them as hypocrites. I don't think this will be a big hit with the evangelical crowd.

There's been a lot of talk about how this film is Stone's star-making role, and she is very good. She works very hard--Gluck might have made it a little easier for her by creating characters around her who could help her out a bit. She shows a nice flair for comedy, and is very easy to root for. There have been comparisons made to Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, but that movie was much better than this one, and I would be loathe, given Silverstone's career since then, to hang that on anyone.

My grade for Easy A: C-.