From the John Hughes era to the Netflix originals of today, the teen comedy genre has gone through many evolutions since its inception. In the 2010s, we were greeted with a fresh crop of new films that felt more emotionally and intellectually mature, with deeper themes and more respect for their characters, than some of the genre’s classics from prior decades. Notable examples include Lady Bird, Easy A, The Edge of Seventeen, Dope, and Eighth Grade. Movies like these paved the way for Olivia Wilde‘s directorial debut, Booksmart, to hit theaters just before the decade ended. Released in 2019, Booksmart remains a perfect blend of the traditional 1980s-era high school comedies and the more sophisticated teen films of the late 2010s.
Perhaps that’s why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it is a favorite of the woman who helped revolutionize the teen comedy genre twice over with 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High and 1995’s Clueless, Amy Heckerling. In her recently released ballot for the New York Times 100 Best Films of the 21st Century list, Booksmart was the only teen comedy to make the famed director’s top ten. While its inclusion may seem like high praise, there’s a real case to be made for Booksmart being the best pure high school comedy of its era.
‘Booksmart’ Provided Audiences With a Modern Take on the High School Movie
Like Superbad before it, Booksmart centers on a pair of friends who embark on a journey to have one crazy night near the end of their senior year of high school. Unlike Jonah Hill and Michael Cera‘s Seth and Evan, though, Booksmart‘s protagonists aren’t driven by any lustful desires to lose their virginity before college. Instead, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and her BFF Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) decide to cut loose for essentially the first time in their young adult lives after the Yale-bound Molly discovers that the rest of her classmates she wrote off as slackers and good-timers are also all attending top colleges. After this revelation crushes her worldview and sends her into a brief existential crisis, she makes it her mission to experience the excitement she missed out on over the last four years and to show everyone that she and Amy are in fact fun by attending a popular graduation party.
Where Booksmart separates itself from some of the high school comedies of the past is in the construction of its characters. While it recognizes and includes some of the familiar high school archetypes—such as nerds, rich kids, stoners, theater kids, and the popular crowd—it doesn’t define any character by one basic trait. In fact, it really only features these stereotypes for the express purpose of proving that they are reductive and untrue. Some of the film’s more emotional moments come when Molly realizes she has had the wrong impression of many of her classmates. Though she wants everyone to see all sides of her, including the fun ones, she comes to understand that she hasn’t been giving that same grace to them. It is an excellent treatise on the way our insecurities can inform the disparity between how we see ourselves and how we wish the world saw us, especially at a young age.
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Another way Booksmart updates its genre is by refraining from focusing too much on the idea of cliques, which played a crucial role in a litany of earlier teen films but felt somewhat outdated by 2019. While the audience can clearly see the differences between many of the film’s characters, nothing feels unnatural or out of place when watching them all interact at a party together. Importantly, this gives Booksmart credibility as a movie that understands and respects the generation it is depicting. This credibility is aided by the fact that the film’s humor is largely built upon the same playful observations and jokes that actual high schoolers in 2019 would make about themselves. One of the fatal flaws of lesser movies about teens is that they think that young people aren’t in on the joke. In modernizing its story to relate to actual teenagers, Booksmart avoids that pitfall completely.
Oliva Wilde Was Influenced by Heckerling When Making ‘Booksmart’
For Wilde, the inclusion of Booksmart on Heckerling’s best films of the century ballot must have been a momentous compliment. When doing press for her debut, the future Don’t Worry Darling director repeatedly cited Heckerling as a key influence. In an interview with the Norwich Bulletin, she said,
“I’m really inspired by Amy Heckerling in general, but specifically by her film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s a perfect example of a fully fleshed-out ensemble. Right before we started shooting, we had a screening of Fast Times for the whole cast.”
For the L.A. Times, Wilde made a list of the films she revisited in preparation for the challenge of directing Booksmart, and both Fast Times and Clueless were included. Here, she called Heckerling’s canonical 1995 film an “anthem for a generation.” Speaking of Clueless’ main character, Cher, Wilde stated she was “a character who could have been misunderstood or minimized … But she was a fully nuanced, interesting, surprising person, and she became iconic because she was different than anything we’ve ever seen before.”
When Criterion released a physical copy of Fast Times in 2021, Wilde was asked to moderate a conversation with Heckerling and Cameron Crowe for the disc’s special features. In a social media post, she referred to this opportunity as a “bucket list” item. Even without all of this public praise, it’s hard not to notice Heckerling’s influence when watching Booksmart. That is why it is heartwarming to know that she is a fan, because it won’t be a shock if one day Wilde’s film is placed in the pantheon of all-time great teen comedies right next to Heckerling’s.
