“Easy A” is easily the best teen comedy in years, maybe since “Clueless.” Today’s entry resembles 1995’s still memorable, satiric tale of contemporary high school folkways in many respects: Both feature bright, adorable girl protagonists savvy about the social structure they are caught in but not quite ready for its sexual pressures. And both highly entertaining farces modernize classic literature. They create from it a template for self-aware pop culture references, hilarious/snappy dialogue, and even some shrewd insight into the existing adolescent experience.
‘Easy A’
Rating » 4 out of 5 starsStars » Emma Stone, Stanley Tucci, Amanda BynesDirector » Will GluckRated PG-13 for mature thematic elements involving teen sexuality, language and some drug materialRunning time » 92 minutes
In the same way that “Clueless” reconfigured Jane Austin’s “Emma,” “Easy A” repurposes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s somber tragedy of Puritan adultery, stigma and hypocrisy, “The Scarlet Letter.” But in this post-feminist age, there are no passive victims like Hester Prynne. Olive Penderghast, played by smoky-voiced redhead Emma Stone (“Superbad,” “Zombieland”), is a brainy nobody at an Ojai, Calif., high school who manufactures her own sex scandal and literally brands herself with the Big Red “A.”
Never mind that the cute, charismatic Stone probably would be one of the popular kids in any other setting. Her character Olive and her gay pal (Dan Byrd) pretend to “do it” in order to shake up both of their loser reputations. But what she didn’t expect: The plan almost immediately begins to backfire as the school prude (an amusingly villainous Amanda Bynes) rallies others to condemn her. Olive soon worries that even her witchy best friend (Aly Michalka, of the new CW series “Hellcats”) and her dreamy longtime crush (“Gossip Girl’s” Penn Badgley) may believe she is class tramp.
The fun and wit of “Easy A” is in the script detail and in the great cast. As produced and directed by Will Gluck and written by Bert V. Royal, it overflows with droll nods to everything from the illicit possibilities of “Huckleberry Finn” to the kitschy disaster that was Demi Moore’s previous big screen incarnation of “The Scarlet Letter.” Most directly, the screenplay mentions and thus compares itself with a John Hughes teen comedy.
If “Easy A” achieves such cult status is will be partly because of its indelible adults: Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as the coolest movie parents ever and Thomas Haden Church, Lisa Kudrow and Malcolm McDowell as an alternately simpatico and evil faculty. You don’t usually get actors of their high caliber to add personality and credence to light kid fare.
But here, the “A” stands for awesome.
