Review: Easy A

In Easy A's caffeinated, pop-song-fuelled opening, the camera glides over the sunny grounds and through the hallways of Ojai North High School. After a swift voiceover and a webcam confession, we meet Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) and her BFF, Rhiannon (Aly Michalka), as they discuss weekend plans and trade snarky barbs that would feel right at home in Juno. So far, so average.

Thesmoky-voiced, freckle-faced Emma Stoneoozes smarts, beauty, verbal dexterity and crack comic timing in every scene she's in.

But once Easy A settles down, it begins to feel smarter than a lot of its teen movie predecessors. Screenwriter Bert V. Royal offers up an appealing heroine in Olive, a savvy young woman who's read Mark Twain and Sylvia Plath, and knows how to use the word "besmirched" in a sentence. This doesn't lead to many hot dates at the Lobster Shack that is, until Olive tells a white lie about losing her virginity (or "V card") to a community college beau.

Thanks to the wonders of text messaging, stories of Olive's sexual prowess spread a development she secretly enjoys, since it earns her several male admirers and finally puts her "on the map" socially. Olive soon finds herself staging fake hookups with all of Ojai High's neediest boys in exchange for gift cards and coupons to Bed, Bath and Beyond. When she's branded a Jezebel, the lessons on The Scarlet Letter she's received in English class come in handy, and she takes to strutting the halls in black bustiers adorned with bright red letter As.

Though the film clearly aspires to be a Gen-Y Clueless, it's not quite as polished. For all its zingy one-liners (the digs at Demi Moore's wretched Scarlet Letter movie adaptation are standouts), there are also other lazy devices. The web-cam confessions used as chapter headings are too self-conscious, and the self-righteous Bible-thumping character Marianne (Amanda Bynes) feels like she belongs in another movie.

That said, Easy A is pretty tough to resist. While the movie pivots on a brazen, comedic sexual premise, it also delivers a few welcome insights into the consequences of Olive's actions that ring true. A scene of a dream date gone awry verges on poignant, and in the film's latter half, it becomes clear that while Olive's social experiment started as a joke, it's not much fun to attend school once you've been labelled a bimbo and a skank.

As the gossip hot tubs! crabs! about Olive escalates, it allows Royal to take some pointed jabs at our current culture of over-sharing. Much to the horror of their English teacher, Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), the teens at Ojai love to express their every thought via tweet, text and Skype, and it's the social-networking culture that enables tales of Olive's exploits to go viral in the first place. The movie never hits you over the head with its message, but it does deserve points for suggesting that losing one's virginity is one life event that's probably best kept private.

Olive learns this the hard way, and by the time she muses, "Whatever happened to chivalry? Does it only exist in '80s movies?" it becomes clear that for all the frank sex jokes, Easy A is much closer in spirit to the old-fashioned John Hughes flicks it references throughout. Like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Sixteen Candles before it, this film is on the side of the geeks, and firmly believes, as Olive does, that it's pretty crappy "to be an outcast, warranted or not."

Director Will Gluck and screenwriter Royal make one nice update to the Hughes formula, however. Olive is surrounded by nurturing, clued-in grown-ups, who include her supportive teacher Mr. Griffith, and her loosey-goosey, permissive parents (scene-stealers Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci). Contrary to the sentiments expressed in The Breakfast Club "when you grow up, your heart dies" Easy A still has faith in adults, a choice that's in keeping with the rest of the movie's sunny outlook.

Easy A's real triumph lies in the casting of Emma Stone as Olive. A smoky-voiced, freckle-faced actress who made a strong impression in small parts in The House Bunny and Superbad, Stone is commanding in the lead, oozing smarts, beauty, verbal dexterity and crack comic timing in every scene she's in.

It's a star-making performance, and the movie is right to keep drawing parallels between Olive and Molly Ringwald's character in Sixteen Candles. Stone makes Olive a true original, and by the film's giddy conclusion, it's clear she's a strong contender for Ringwald's former title of "teen queen."

Easy A opens Sept. 17.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.