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EMMA STONE stars in Easy A with Penn Badgley

By Sandra Olmsted

Rarely does a teen flick have a stellar cast, a great and meaningful script, and a sense that there is some hope for the next generation, but screenwriter Bert V. Royal and director Will Gluck’s Easy A has all that and more.

It’s a smart and funny mediation on the world today and the plethora of networking tools that convey remediations of the world, and the film is, therefore, appropriately framed by Olive Penderghast’s live webcast recounting her Hester Prynne-like fall from grace, or rather oblivion.

In an ocean of beautiful California girls, the smart, funny, compassionate, and self-admittedly boring Olive (Emma Stone) is acutely aware of being overlooked despite her quiet beauty.  But perhaps that’s it:  She’s quiet and studious in a boiling mass of loud, attentions-seeking, text messaging, tweeting, and facebooking teens.  To cover up a weekend happily spent doing nothing but hanging out at home with the greeting-card lyric “a pocket full of sunshine”  stuck in her head, Olive creates a fictitious encounter with an imaginary college friend of her older brother.

To impress her BFF Rhi (Aly Michalka), Olive claims to have lost her “V-Card” i.e. her virginity.  Unfortunately, she makes this false confession in the restroom, and Marianne (Amanda Bynes), the leader of the high school’s self-righteous, promise-not-to-have-sex, Christian teens, overhears their conversation and spreads the rumor.

Suddenly, Olive is on everyone’s radar.  The boys, even the promise boys, are fantasizing about Olive.  When Olive’s favorite teacher, Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), begins teaching The Scarlet Letter, Olive is the subject of a cruel comparison by Nina (Mahaley Hessam) one of Marianne’s disciples.  Olive’s vulgar retort lands her in the office of the Principal Gibbons (played acerbically by Malcolm McDowell) who gives Olive detention and threatens to expel her if she lands in his office again.

Because of Olive’s decision to change her wardrobe and the speed of communications or rather rumors, Olive is soon the class . . . , well, fill in the blank.  In detention, Olive runs into Brandon (Dan Byrd), a grade school friend, who is gay and being bullied.  Soon, Brandon has a business proposition for Olive: trade imaginary sex for money so that the other guys won’t harass him.

Soon Olive finds herself in free fall down a slippery slope of compassion-driven pretend sex for hard cash, or rather gift cards.  Although enjoying the notoriety, she’s digging a hole for herself, and she is going to have to dig herself out — if she can.

She might even get a little help from Todd (Penn Badgley), the boy she’s liked for forever, but can she regain her good name and minimize the hurt?

As Olive, Emma Stone leads an all-star cast of accomplished actors who normally wouldn’t go near a regular teen flick, but than Easy A is anything but a genre clone.  As Olive’s father, Dill, Stanley Tucci charmingly and expertly reminds the audience that he’s also a comic actor after his award-winning turn as serial killer in The Lovely Bones.  There are also great performances by Church as Olive’s favorite teacher; Lisa Kudrow as his wife and the guidance counselor, and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s mother, Rosemary, who often tells Olive more than she wants to know about mom and dad’s hippy days.

However, the really magic and comedy happen because screenwriter Royal creates a microcosm of the adult world and adds layers and depth with literary references and because of Gluck’s thoughtful direction.  Reminiscent of Clueless and Orange County, Easy A is anything but a run-of-the-mill teen flick, and Emma Stone’s performance might do for her what Anne Hathaway’s in The Princess Diaries did for her — make her acting talents known.

A Screen Gems release, Easy A runs 92 minutes and is rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements involving teen sexuality, language and some drug material.

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