Nearly every review of this movie has compared it to Mean Girls, and it does make sense to liken Easy A to that quotable cult-classic. Red-haired, smoky-voiced Emma Stone (Superbad, The House Bunny) is like a less cocaine-addicted Lindsay Lohan, and Easy A’s cast of characters is just as hilariously skewed and witty as Mean Girls.
But this film does its predecessor one better simply by the fact that Stone, playing snarky, relatable, and effervescent Olive Penderghast, is so adept at playing the goodhearted Everygirl who’s easy to adore and root for.
Meanwhile, every character, no matter how much of a bit player, is chock full of witty one-liners and — even more remarkable — most seem like complete people rather than archetypes, and that’s saying a lot for a teen movie.
Easy A, directed by Will Gluck, is really just so enjoyable because it doesn’t pander to its audience. This is a film that’s side-splitting all the way through, but it also is remarkably well-written. Thanks to Bert. V Royal’s rapid-fire but also down-to-earth script, you end up feeling for these characters as well as cracking up at their various hijinks.
Olive is sharp and charming, but not a preternaturally walking dictionary à la Rory Gilmore; better yet, she’s not a vain, vapid heroine.
Awesomely enough, the movie takes its name and premise from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Olive uses the novel to flout her clean-cut high school’s rumor mongering, sewing a bright red “A” to all her clothes after a misguided rumor spreads like wildfire through the student body and gets her the reputation of school tramp.
Suddenly, with the white lie that she lost her virginity to an older guy the weekend before, wallflower Olive is the talk of her small California high school.
She finds herself enjoying all that newfound attention, leading her to agree to help out her gay friend, Brandon (Dan Byrd) by pretending to have sex with him so that homophobes will stop teasing him. But things quickly go up in flames when Olive decides to capitalize on her school slut reputation by engaging in more fake trysts, trading Best Buy and Amazon.com gift cards to nerds in want of their own notoriety.
Enter self-righteous Christian activist and resoundingly dumb Marianne (Amanda Bynes), who wants to shame Olive right out of school for her deviant ways.
Every high school needs a villain, and naïve but pompous Marianne serves that purpose well, scathing in her judgment of Olive at the same time as she’s holding hands and praying.
Add in Olive’s wry, adoringly oddball parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson), her classy, cool-guy English teacher (Thomas Haden Church), batty school counselor (Lisa Kudrow), and token cute nice guy and school mascot Woodchuck Todd (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley), and you’ve got a cast that’s richly entertaining throughout.
Where too many teen comedies tend to trade on stereotypes, it’s refreshing to see a movie that really seems to respect its characters and its audience, giving them depth and hilarity to work with.
Stone is a breakout star, warm, sassy, gorgeous and self-aware. Plus, she’s somehow far more believable, at 21 years old, as a teenager than Lindsay Lohan was at seventeen in Mean Girls.
Penn Badgley’s Woodchuck Todd is a bit flat, clearly thrown in just because it’s impossible to have a teen room-com without a buff, romantic male lead, and Amanda Bynes’ Marianne could’ve been given more to work with because she’s just a flat-out witch-with-a-b.
But those are pretty small quibbles for a movie that had the audience cracking up constantly, whether it was at Olive’s endlessly over-sharing parents, her sweetly unselfconscious rocking out to a greeting card that plays Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine,” or Olive’s sarcastically barbed interactions with longtime best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka).
Of course, Easy A owes a lot to classic comedies of the ‘80s ,and the film acknowledges that debt by launching into a montage of those hits and having Olive bemoan that she’s always wished her life was like a John Hughes movie. Easy A captures Hughes’ vintage ambiance pays respect to all of his witty, tangled-in-love teens.
So if you’re looking for an endlessly quotable movie, something light and frothy but not mind-dulling, Easy A is definitely it. Better yet, it’s a great date movie, providing some eye candy for the guys and a fast-moving, charming story and pace that anyone will enjoy.
