Written by Perrin Smith, Photo courtesy of Savannah Film Festival
The title “Booksmart” flashes on-screen. It’s fast, sudden, but it’s not at all what has my attention. Up until this moment, when the title illuminates the screen, it’s been pitch-black dark. What has my complete focus isn’t the word in front of me, it’s the booming, ever-present rhythm of the pop soundtrack in the background. It’s been getting louder and louder until we’re suddenly met with the words of the film, and then, it begins. This is a hint at what Olivia Wilde will be doing for the next two hours from behind the camera. It’s a hint that this film is loud, albeit subtle; booming with pop music, yet able to make you think about something that’s not on the screen. It’s overtly comedic while completely dramatic.
In “Booksmart,” director Olivia Wilde does something that is near impossible in cinema today: she made comedy funny, and most importantly, mean something.
There’s something really charming about seeing an experience you’ve gone through blown up in the glow of a massive screen. For “Booksmart,” this is the ability to redo a time of your life after missing out on it, something almost everyone can relate to. For some, that time is middle school and for others it’s college, but for Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein), two overachievers in high school, it’s the chance to give in to teenage experiences they missed out on the past four years. This is condensed into a single night. They spend the next two hours going from party to party gaining all the ups and downs of being a teenager in rapid-fire, quick-paced hilarity.
But the point of “Booksmart” isn’t to just be funny; Wilde does something that not even the greatest of comedy directors can do, she gives her film purpose, and what’s more, drama. Wilde is capable of taking us from crying with laughter to breathless with emotions in a matter of seconds. That takes power. She can take us from the loud, explicit beats of Lizzo to the soft, vulnerable synth of Perfume Genius. It’s incredible, really, that a film can have its feet in so many different genres without ever feeling like the point has been lost or that it’s too much drama to still be labeled a comedy.
For the entire runtime, what keeps us grounded is the combination of funny, outright hilarious moments in tandem with awkward interactions that ring a little too true of being a teenager. We’re able to go from an outrageously hilarious scene featuring a deep-throated microphone to a quiet scene of flirtatious intimacy between two romantic hopefuls. The two scenes cut without missing a beat. It’s loud, soft, then loud again, and it’s something that hits the feelings of being a teenager in high school, especially in the 2010s, right on the nose.
Wilde knocks it out of the park with her first directorial credit for a feature film. “Booksmart” is an intelligently funny, subtly emotive film that serves as an eloquent send-off to a very tumultuous decade and time in life.
