Easy A is a polished teen comedy that takes its themes and some story elements from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. It is not a teeny update of the book, like how Ten Things I Hate About You was a new version of The Taming of the Shrew or how My Fair Lady, Can't Buy Me Love or Drive Me Crazy were new versions of Pygmalion. Rather this story is original (and by "original" I mean totally recycled from dozens of high school comedy movies) and deals with ideas of sin, sluttiness and gossip.
Olive (Emma Stone) is a precocious, beautiful and sharp-tongued high school student who claims to have no status in her high school. Apparently "no status" means that everyone knows her name and everyone loves to gossip about her. One day in the bathroom, she tells her best friend that she had a date with an older guy and had sex with him. Someone overhears this and the news spreads around the school like a bullet and makes her popular and notorious.
At some point the school's gay kid (there has to be one, of course) approaches her and asks her to say that the two of them had sex, cementing her reputation as a floozy and suggesting to classmates that he digs chicks and not dudes (because gay kids in high school who are totally cool with being gay still like to be seen as straight. Right.). Olive does this for him and then does it for a slew of other weirdos and losers in her class, each time taking a small payment for the job. Of course, she's not actually doing anything with these kids - just saying she is.
Meanwhile, Olive and her classmates are reading the Hawthorne book in English class and she's the only one who really understands it. When the Christian club at her school starts to get upset by what they hear she's doing, she goes home, sews a few naughty outfits all emblazoned with a scarlet "A" on the chest. You see, she's suggesting she's like Hester Prynne and that her moral turpitude is similar to the character's in the book. It seems like a big of a stretch (a lot of a stretch), but whatever.
Emma Stone is actually very good in this. She has the perfect over-enunciated sharp tone in her voice to pull off the very exact, clever dialogue, by writer Bert V. Royal. She's super self-confident and very fun and the kind of girl you would love to date. This, of course, is the big problem, because she's supposed to be a weirdo loser and not a cool girl. It's very confusing, actually, because we're supposed to feel sorry for her at times, but she seems like a girl who doesn't need the pity of anyone... or would punch you in the face if she knew you felt bad for her.
The script throughout the film moves from very funny dialogue to very muddled narrative-wise. There is way too much going on here. The second half of it spirals deeper and deeper into a black hole, when keeping it simple would have done just fine enough. There is a lot of funny and amusing stuff in this, but there is also a lot of waste and indulgence (perhaps as a way of staying clear of The Scarlet Letter or other teeny comedies).
The cast in this is really outstanding, and surprising for such a moderately scaled movie. Aside from Stone, you have teeny soap stars Penn Badgely and Amanda Bynes as well as grown people Thomas Hayden Church, Lisa Kudrow, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Malcolm McDowell and Fred Armisen. (Wow! Big cast!) Clarkson and Tucci are great as Olive's parents. They're very sarcastic and funny and work well together as loving parents of a kid who doesn't screw up that much. It's a relief to see Tucci in a role where he doesn't play an asshole with an affected accent. (And of course, there's something funny about Malcolm McDowell playing the principal of the school in a teen rebellion movie.)
There really isn't anything to hate in this movie, but I had a hard time trying to figure out why some people are saying it's better than the average teen comedy. It does have very snappy dialogue and Olive's best friend is named Rhiannon (which is sorta perfect and fantastic, actually!), but it gets buried in so many layers of junk on top of the story that it's hard to get through it. It feels like a man wearing three hats. Why doesn't he just wear one hat? Why does he need so many hats?
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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