Booksmart (2019, Olivia Wilde) (Patreon)

52/100

This was quite a ride. Actively disliked the first 15 or 20 minutes, to the point where I'd have bet...maybe not the farm, but at least a rusty bale lifter and some annoyingly loud goats that my eventual rating would be an emphatic W/O. At some point, however, either Dever and Feldstein belatedly find a groove or I belatedly locked into the groove they'd already found, and the annoying stuff—Skyler Gisondo's painfully strenuous attempt to be McLovin II; Wilde deploying needle drops like whippets; the plot hinging on every burnout in this high school having achieved 99th-percentile job offers and/or college admissions—became secondary to the pleasure of being in these two young women's joint company. Dever in particular creates a contemporary spin on screwball rhythms, at times suggesting Rosalind Russell as a Gen Z overachiever. Feldstein initially put me off as much as her brother often does, but settles into a less manic mode once the inciting incident is behind her. Also loved Billie Lourd's variation on the requisite space cadet, and Gigi inexplicably turning up ahead of Amy and Molly everywhere they go is a running gag that's no less funny even once it becomes expected. So I kept watching, happy to have been mistaken. That is, until the girls finally arrive at Nick's party, where the film all but runs out of steam with a good 45 minutes still to go. First it makes the mistake of separating them, so that each can pursue her own misguided romantic interest; then it manufactures a conflict between them that could have been avoided by Amy simply saying "Yo, I just saw your guy and my gal improbably snacking on each other's faces, let's motor." (I know Amy's ostensibly trying to protect Molly, but the whole thing's bad-sitcom-level contrived, phony and dumb.) What's more, the last half-hour largely dispenses with comedy in order to methodically reveal another, counterintuitive side of every cartoonish minor character, in a way that starts to feel more oppressive than liberating. By the end, my ardor had cooled significantly, though the final scene at the airport recaptures what had been special about the central relationship (and seems to assume, not without reason, that we've all seen Lady Bird, though it has nothing to do with the character that Feldstein plays in that film). File alongside Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, another instance of my liking the two leads considerably more than the film they're in.