Olivia Wilde makes a funny, warm high-school comedy, with Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever convincing as friends who have overestimated their own judgement. The tidy handling of their mistakes is the main reservation.
Booksmart is a funny, generous high-school comedy with a tendency to make growing up look easier than it is. Olivia Wilde gives two academically successful friends a night to discover how much they have misunderstood about the people around them. The attraction is watching them get things wrong without losing our affection, even when their confidence becomes irritating. We recommend it for the friendship and the jokes, with a reservation about how neatly its messier feelings are tidied away.
The script, credited to Susanna Fogel, Sarah Haskins, Emily Halpern and Katie Silberman, gives its bright girls a useful failing: they have mistaken good marks for good judgement. Molly and Amy are allowed to be selfish, blinkered and convinced that they already understand everybody else. Their classmates become people worth knowing, rather than targets supplied to flatter the heroines. We laughed at the gap between the girls’ certainty and their grasp of other people. The jokes work because their misjudgements are so recognisable.
Beanie Feldstein’s Molly and Kaitlyn Dever’s Amy make that friendship believable before the film asks us to worry about it. They are persuasive as girls accustomed to sharing a judgement before either has finished forming it. The quick exchanges have the ease of an established routine, and both actors leave room for the other to be funny. The quieter reactions matter as much as the dialogue, especially when confidence gives way to uncertainty. We believe these two have spent a great deal of time together.
Jason McCormick’s cinematography suits the rush into a social life the girls have kept at a distance. The polished images make the partying inviting, and Olivia Wilde keeps the visual playfulness connected to her excitable leads. Katie Byron’s production design helps make this teenage world look comfortable and desirable, perhaps too consistently. There is little sense of anyone having to worry about what any of this costs. That fits the girls’ sheltered outlook, but it limits how far the film looks beyond their social circle.
Editors Jamie Gross and Brent White keep the night moving at a pace that makes the detours easy to forgive. At 102 minutes, the film has enough room for the central pair to hesitate without making every hesitation into a lesson. The music, credited to Dan the Automator, Boys Noize and Twin Shadow, helps sustain the excitement between the jokes. There are stretches when the combination of brisk cutting, music and polished pictures pushes too hard for our enjoyment; the actors need less encouragement than the film gives them.
The more substantial weakness is the willingness to soften awkward feelings once they threaten to become unpleasant. Olivia Wilde is attentive to teenage hurt, but sometimes seems too eager to reassure us that it will prove manageable. That makes the comedy agreeable company, and slightly reduces the force of the girls’ mistakes. We wanted a little more time with the discomfort, rather than another reminder that these are decent people underneath.
Booksmart is at ease with girls being crude and unreasonable, which is a useful quality in a bawdy school comedy. We do not need these friends to be role models, and the film usually remembers that. It can afford to let them embarrass themselves because the actors have made us fond of them. Watch it with someone who remembers when being good at school seemed a reliable guide to everything else.
