Booksmart Review

There are many coming-of-age high school films that focus on graduation, prom, or a big party. Booksmart‘s USP is being a female-centric party film and is already considered by some critics as one of the best comedies of 2019.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best friends who have their education above everything else and look down on their peers. And their hard work seems to have paid off with them getting into top universities. But this illusion is shattered when they find out that their peers who partied hard also got into these same colleges. So they decide to attend a big party being hosted by one of the popular kids before graduating to prove they are fun. They just need to find it.

Booksmart was a film that had a big buzz around it for a long time – the original screenplay was on the Black List and the film was produced by Gloria Sanchez Productions, the sister company to Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Production.

Making  R-Rated comedies has a number of pitfalls. There are many comedies that use swearing and drug taking as a short cut to a joke. Some comedies are just vehicles for comedians to let riff without a filter. Booksmart is a much better written and directed film that avoids these mistakes.

Booksmart is essentially an indie production – it was made on a modest budget of $6 million and starred young, fairly unknown actors. This gave the filmmakers more freedom since they could focus on the important things: character development. Feldstein and Dever had great chemistry together – they did feel like they were longtime friends. They have terrific futures ahead of them.

Molly and Amy’s arc was that they had to loosen up, but for different reasons. Molly was like Reese Witherspoon’s character in the 1999 Election, a Type A personality who puts everything aside to achieve her goals. And she has a superiority complex over her peers. Amy is a shyer and more naive – she’s a lesbian but doesn’t know the mechanics of same-sex intercourse. They grow on their night of drinking, drug-taking, and lawbreaking.

The film has a positive message – people should have a proper work/life balance. People need to do well at school but they also need to live, have fun or else it’s pointless. The film always has a message that everyone is a little bit screwed up and the girls would have known this if gotten to know them. Booksmart wanted to look past the stereotypes, whether it’s someone being a boy trying too hard to be liked to a girl who has a slutty reputation.

Actress Olivia Wilde makes her directional debut with this and she shows talent behind the camera. Booksmart was a great film for Wilde to cut her teeth into, similar to what Greta Gerwig achieved with Lady Bird. Booksmart does have some funny sequences: my favourites were the drugs hallucination and when the girls try to intimidate a pizza delivery driver. The hallucination was wonderfully surreal and both sequences had fantastic dialogue. Wilde and the writers also ensured that there was some dramatic weight at the end of the second act.

Booksmart manages to be a funny film with a strong message. It was made with good intentions and is a high-quality comedy.