Blockers - 2018, d. Kay Cannon - Crave
Since their inception - in a way spinning out of Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 classic(?) The Last Picture Show - the raucous teen comedy have largely been told from a male point of view. Even those stories starring female leads can often be pretty male-gazey. Sure there are plenty of great teen, female-led high school comedies - Easy A, Mean Girls, 10 Things I Hate About You - and more recently a lot of great light dramas - Eighth Grade, Lady Bird - but they're hardly what I would call raucous. That type of female-led high school comedy has been pretty elusive up to now, but within the span of a year we have two comedies with a very similar set-up that finally give us the teen girl equivalent of Superbad or American Pie.
Both Booksmart and Blockers take place in the final days of these young women's grade 12 semester, leading up to Prom night. In Booksmart, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) play best friends who have foregone any socialization and partying to focus almost exclusively on academic endeavors and getting into the best colleges. When they find out that all the popular, partying kids have also been accepted into the best colleges they find themselves in a mad scramble to make big swing memories in their final days as high schoolers. Blockers meanwhile finds a trio of besties (oof, don't feel good about using that word) who enter into a sex pact, a promise to all lose their virginity on Prom night. When their parents catch wind of the pact, they take extreme measures to try to stop it. Despite this premise, the film gives the teens and their parents equal time and attention.
While Blockers is definitely more sex-focused than Booksmart, both films wade in playing with, warping, or defying the conventions of the high school comedy. With Booksmart this entails dispensing with the mean girl collective and avoiding bullying behaviour. At this point at this upscale Californian high school everyone is tolerant of each other, and, in fact Molly and Amy are only outcasts because of their snobbish attitude towards partying. Once they decide to let loose, they're very much welcomed in as part of the crowd, unexpected highlights of the evening even. Meanwhile, Blockers is about defying the stigma of female sexuality, that it's something to be protected and preserved, which is the opposite of male sexuality which should be frivolous and conquering. Where American Pie and its raunchy predecessors were about the desperate gambits of teen males seeking their first sexual encounter, Blockers dispenses with the desperation. Julie (Kathryn Newton) is in a longtime relationship already and makes the decision to go all the way. Sporty, confident Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) is ready to jump in the mix and seemingly picks out a suitor at random in the lunchroom. Sam (Gideon Adlon) meanwhile reluctantly agrees to the pact, less because she's unsure of having sex, and more because she's still in the closet.
I had expected the adult leads of Blockers - Leslie Mann playing Julie's mom, John Cena playing Kayla's dad, and Ike Barinholtz playing Sam's dad - to be very single minded and collectively unified in their venture to interrupt their kid's prom night, but Mann's Lisa has very personal reasons for her actions, while Barinholtz's Hunter more just wants to stop his daughter from having sex with a boy, keenly aware of his daughter's homosexuality. Cena's Mitchell is the knee-jerk reactionary father, his big muscles and sports metaphors are quick shorthand to acknowledging the character's discomfort with his daughter's femininity and sexuality. Throughout, Blockers constantly reminds you how wrong-headed the adults of the film are in thought and behaviour, despite their seeming best intentions. Hunter, despite being the wild card of the group, is the voice of reason for them, but his backstory leads to frequent dismissal.
Amy in Booksmart is also a lesbian, but she has been out for some time, but due to her anti-partying stance she hasn't even ventured to look for a girlfriend or deign for a first kiss. With their newly liberated partying selves, Amy decides to (awkwardly) chase her long-time crush. Amy's parents (played by Will Forte and Lisa Kudrow) are religious and have a hard time with her being a lesbian, but love her dearly and make pained efforts towards reluctant acceptance. I like both films approaches to this, showing different stages of both acceptance of self and familial acceptance of one's sexual identity.
As comedies, both are quite funny. Blockers feels more Hollywood, where the situations the characters get into and their responses to them are often larger than life, while Booksmart's humour is more grounded in the characters and the gifted comedic delivery of Feldstein and Dever. Both have a "one wild and crazy night" setup but Booksmart has a razor sharp focus on two of its players (with an incredibly well-established microcosm of characters to surround them) where Blockers has to split its attention six ways (and yet does so remarkably well).
Both films derive unique and distinct identities for all of their teen players. There's no hive mind here, and, especially in the case of Booksmart there's a real tendency to lean away from the superficial. Even some of the way aside characters seem to have a rich inner life we don't get to explore.
Teen comedies like this can age poorly and rapidly so. In the moment Booksmart is a "must see", an incredibly confident and impressive directorial debut from Wilde. Blockers is more of a "worth seeing", a movie that can't decide whether it's playing to an adult or teen audience but impressively works for both.
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