Review of Easy A (2010) by Mikael K — 22 Jan 2015

Before seeing "Easy A" I thought that the idea of a good teenage comedy could never manifest itself in the material world. But here it is. And no, it's not a quirky Sundance favorite that plays around with the tropes of your average Hollywood teenage comedy, it is a Hollywood teenage comedy, average in tone and construction, just exceptional in quality.

Emma Stone is brilliantly perfect as Olive Penderghast, a brainy, not especially popular girl who leads a high school life of convenient invisibility. Then a delicious set of coincidences makes Olive the most infamous girl in school. Trying to avoid the stigma of a bore after a weekend spent home doing nothing, Olive improvises a lie about having lost her virginity to an unnamed college boy instead. The lie will soon spread as an exaggerated rumor by the Christian element of the school, branding Olive a girl fallen. After helping a bullied gay teen with a lie about shared coitus (the execution is funny as heck) Olive refuses to repent and starts a performance of sexual liberation. Partly because she panics, but increasingly because she begins to hate the moralism she now faces. Uncovered double standard abound.

Olive gets deeper and deeper into her act. She wears revealing clothes, invents sexual encounters, gives a nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne by wearing a scarlet letter "A" on her dress. Ultimately she begins accepting money from boys who want her to tell everyone she's had sex with them in order to raise their social status. Here especially the film moves away from goofy comedy territory and exposes the blatant ways gender inequality manifests within a teenaged community as well as in how differently parents view the sexual awakening of their children based solely on their gender.

The exception to the rule are Olive's completely amazing parents, played by Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. They are progressive and trusting towards their daughter and happen to be hysterically hilarious at the same time. In them the film's perfect mix of energy, great entertainment value and substantial wisdom crystalizes.

"Easy A" is uniquely sharp, intelligent and courageous as social commentary as well as a convincing, no-nonsense piece of feminist cinema. It wonderfully breaks the conventions of the teenage film, a genre that tends to rely on simplifications and hideously narrow and diminutive female roles. Bert V. Royal's script is a blast, filled with just the right lines. Grade A.