Review #257: 'Easy A' (2010)

Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is a confident and highly intelligent girl that is doing well at school until she lies to her best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) to get out of a camping trip. Rhiannon presses her for details and Olive ends up telling her that she and her made-up boyfriend had sex. They are overheard by the school religious freak Marianna (Amanda Byrnes), who spreads the gossip around like wildfire. Olive is then approached by her old friend Brandon (Dan Byrd), a boy who is being bullied because he is gay. He asks her if she will pretend to have sex with him in order to convince others that he is straight, to which she reluctantly agrees. Soon Olive is making money from desperate boys wanting to be known for having sex with her, at the cost of her reputation.

It's rare that teen comedies actually get the formula right, especially in the last ten years or so. There was a boom back in the late 1990's, started by the hugely successful American Pie (1999), which lasted a good ten years and is still a successful marketplace. If Easy A shares any similarities to any of the teen comedies of recent years, then it's the Tina Fey-scripted Mean Girls (2004), which was a smart and very funny story of high school rivalry and bitchiness. Yet Easy A shares it's true roots with a different era of teen films - the 1980's. Director Will Gluck's favourite film is Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), and the love and homages are plain to see. Olive even fantasises about her life being like a John Hughes movie.

Like Mean Girls, the screenplay is fantastic, and has a talent in Emma Stone to chew on the lines (I'll get to her later). Not only is the script very smart and funny, it's also venomous. Scriptwriter Bert V. Royal has created a highly intelligent character in Olive that can spit back an insult as good as anybody. When studying The Scarlet Letter (of which the film is obviously based on) in English class, one of the religious freaks who is disgusted by the rumours states her disapproval for the lead character in the book, before turning to Olive and saying 'perhaps you should embroider a red A on your wardrobe, you abominable tramp,' to which Olive replies 'maybe you should get a wardrobe, you abominable twat!'. Shocking, vicious, and very funny.

But the film's masterstroke is Emma Stone. While it's hard to believe that she blends into the background (as she describes at the beginning of the film - I mean, come on, she's gorgeous), she gives a performance full of swagger and confidence. Husky-voiced and super-smart, she gives Olive - who in somebody else's hands might quickly become unsympathetic or annoying - a likeability and vulnerability that makes her wholly endearing. Her talent was always obvious from her supporting roles in Superbad (2007) and Zombieland (2009), but this will surely catapult her to wholly deserved stardom.

If there's complaints to be made about the film, then some of the clever-clever quips and the interactions with her rather annoying parents (played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) can be cloying, and the film does rather run out of steam near to the end. But the film remains enjoyable, charming and genuinely funny. And it's a strong reminder that the teen comedy still has life in it, given a decent script and a bit of heart.


Directed by: Will Gluck
Starring: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Byrnes, Dan Byrd, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Thomas Haden Church, Lisa Kudrow, Malcolm McDowell, Aly Michalka
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie