By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
Emma Stone, a relative newcomer, who showed she could hold her own opposite Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray in “Zombieland,” plays the lead in “Easy A,” a comic riff on “The Scarlett Letter” set in a California high school. And while Stone is challenged by an array of high power character actors, she quickly takes control of the picture and keeps it running one level above the material.
The set up is promising. Olive, a quick witted, but self conscious 17year old, makes the mistake of telling her loud mouth friend, (Amanda Bynes,) she had sex with a college student. When word gets around that she’s “easy,” she elicits both the envy and scorn of her peers, who use her indiscretion to advance their own ends. While some want sex, most are more interested in the change to their social status that her association will bring.
No one will ever mistake “Easy A” for “Election,” or “Juno;” It doesn’t exploit its premise with nearly as much depth as more incisive teen comedies. But it’s solidly funny.
Director Will Gluck has taken Bert V. Royals’ agile script and treated it like a high end sit com, keeping the narrative at arms length from the darker implications of Olive’s situation. He and the editor have done their best to avoid stillness, understandablely given the target audience. But their movie is so obsessively focused on jokes the inherent ironies go unexploited. “Easy A” didn’t have to be “Heathers,” but too often it plays safe for a young audience that welcomes a little more candor.
Gluck has encouraged an A list cast of character actors to play most of their lines for laughs. But even when they’re pushed two registers higher than necessary, the spirited performers come through. Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Malcolm McDowell, Lisa Kudrow, Thomas Haden Church, among others, might have been better served by dialing down and putting more flesh on their characters’ bones. Nonetheless, they hit their marks and keep the movie percolating at a good pace.
Emma Stone, with her husky voice, and quick wit, is the glue that keeps the material together. On camera for almost every scene, she put so much spin on the words, she convinces us there’s something at stake. Still, she and the other “students” in the movie, like Penn Badgely and Amanda Bynes, look easily five years older than their parts. I kept glancing around at the kids in the audience, wondering how they felt about seeing themselves played by people old enough to be in graduate school.
One day Ms. Stone she’ll get a role that allows her both comedy and grace. But after a summer full of shoddily made comedies, at least this one places its faith in language as a means of expressing humor. Give “Easy A” a solid B.
“Never Let Me Go,” lives on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, as slavishly dour as “Easy A” is comic. In spite of skillful filmmaking and the best intentions, it’s an empty shell of a movie, full of pretensions to art that never pan out.
We begin at a private school tucked away in the bucolic English country side. The cherubic youngsters, uniformly groomed and outfitted, appear no different than the kids we’ve seen in countless poignant dramas set in the UK’s public school system. But these kids aren’t typical kids. And their fate is as frozen as the clenched expression on headmistress Charlotte Rampling’s face.
The movie’s conclusion, which takes place in the present, is revealed in the opening, so we know that very little good will come of the situation. The first third or so, which deals with their pre pubescence, is vividly detailed in both setting and character. A friendship among two girls and a boy becomes more complicated as they become teenagers.
The three very young leads are well defined; the acting is impeccable. Midway through the sequence, the children are told they won’t have much of an adult hood. We’re sympathetic and unsure why. But when we visit them later, as Andrew Garfield, Kera Knightley and Carey Mulligan, the story turns mechanical.
The adult actors deliver nuanced performances, but the script gives them little to work with beyond the sadness of their fate. And for a movie that’s all dialogue I can’t recall one interesting conversation that really brought them to life, much less a dramatic moment that accomplished more than connecting the bare bones of the plot line.
Mark Romanek, who directed the stylish but plot starved “One Hour Photo,” can’t really be blamed. His direction, moment to moment, is fluid and coherent. The cinematography, especially in the beginning, has a soft and comforting hue that raises our hopes that the movie will build to something worthwhile. The script is where the film finally disappoints.
It isn’t that the idea at the story’s core is preposterous. It is, but we’re usually willing to accept nutty ideas when they’re presented to us in a movie’s opening. We take the movies’ world on faith, in order to see where the makers are going with it. But then it becomes their responsibility, as story tellers, to keep us in a state of willful disbelief. We expect more than a force march into decline.
It’s ok for characters to lose in the end; Shakespeare kills everybody off in his tragedies. And we never leave them feeling cheated. But when characters roll over and play dead from the get go, we start to wonder why we should care. And as this falling action is attenuated, the feeling grows to resentment.
There’s an arresting moment midway, on an isolated beach, involving two of the characters and an abandoned boat. The texture suggested painstaking attention to detail. The sky and its relationship to the land, in particular, is so evocative you can imagine the cast and crew waiting days to get it just so. Their time would have better spent rethinking the material.
Both “Never Let Me Go,” and “Easy A” debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. Their arrival in theaters signals the beginning of the fall movie going season. After a disappointing summer, word from Toronto, Venice, and Telluride is that better films are on the way. The initial box office success of “The Town,” suggests that adults are returning to theaters. Let’s hope the trend continues.
