Jason F.C. Clarke

Never Been Kissed

I have to admit, I’ve been a fan of Drew Barrymore since Poison Ivy. This is a slightly
naughty film that also stars Roseanne’s Sarah Gilbert and Tom Skerrit, whom I’m not a big fan of. Anyway, the film stars Barrymore as a Lolita-like teen hired to help around the house when Skerrit’s wife gets sick or is in an accident or something. Anyway, you know how it goes, one thing leads to another and Skerrit and Barrymore, to quote my friend Michael Mazzilli, “get it on.” The wife kills herself, Gilbert’s character catches her dad and Ivy in bed and is understandably screwed up by this, and the whole thing is tragic, etc. etc. Anyway, this movie made me a fan of Barrymore. Perhaps for the wrong reasons. Hmm. Anyway…I really became a fan of Drew Barrymore after The Wedding Singer. This is a sweet little movie starring Barrymore and Adam Sandler as two lovebirds destined for each other, despite the usual 2-dimensional villainous love interests. Barrymore has, as Jay Carr of the Boston Globe wonderfully put it (paraphrasing Dreiser, I think), a “face that inspires yearning.” She makes you want to make everything perfect for her, to give her whatever she wants. She’s adorable.

Barrymore plays this role to a tee in her newest film, Never Been Kissed. It’s a sweet movie focused around high school, a genre that has been pushed by Hollywood lately (see my review of Election).

In Kissed, Barrymore plays a reporter, Josie, who works for the Chicago Sun-Times. In the breakthrough assignment of her career, Josie is sent undercover to a high school for a human interest story. Of course, Josie, who was at the top of her class at Northwestern, was not exactly the most popular student at her high school–a fact which is related through a series of heartbreaking flashbacks. Josie seems headed for disaster during her undercover assignment, failing so miserably to infiltrate the “popular” clique that she is mistaken for a Special Ed student. Enter David Arquette as Josie’s brother Rob, a 23-year-old wash-out looking for one last chance at making it into minor league baseball by going back to high school and joining the team. Of course, he becomes popular in a single day, and uses that popularity to make Josie into a high school star.

Barrymore plays the insecure Josie with a perfect blend of intellectual confidence and social ineptitude. As she becomes more and more mired in the culture of the popular clique, we see her fight against it inwardly, remembering the smart, slightly geeky girl who first befriended her (played by the wonderful Leelee Sobieski). Of course, there’s a love interest as well–Sam Coulson, Josie’s Shakespeare teacher, played by Michael Vartan, whose job it is to basically stand around and look attractive.

There are a few misfires in the film. The flashbacks to Josie’s high school experience occasionally ring false with their viciousness–particularly the scene in which she waits for her prom date. The way that Vartan’s Coulson flirts with Josie seems so improper that I almost want to agree with her boss when he tells her that Coulson’s scandalous behavior should be her story. And finally, there’s the rather implausible final scene, which I won’t ruin for the reader; I’ll refer to it as Roger Ebert did, as the “5-minute wait.”

The one amusing, if rather cheap, scene is the one in which Coulson’s girlfriend is introduced. I’ve never seen the “other man/woman” character be introduced and revealed in all their evil 2-dimensionality so quickly. Even Billy Zane’s character in Titanic had a few minutes before he became totally evil. It’s a nice counterpart, however, to Barrymore’s similarly shallow boyfriend in The Wedding Singer.

Overall, Never Been Kissed is a charming, entertaining crossover between the high school coming-of-age film and the romantic comedy. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it doesn’t do anything too wrong, either. While I don’t recommend it for those who are troubled by scenes of extreme embarassment–I cringed through half this film–it’s still a nice film for a date on a Saturday night.

—05/23/99

Election

Seeing Election was one of those rare times when I’ve gone into a movie without any real clue of what it’s about. I had been told that it is a vague allegory of the 1992 presidential election, but watching for allegorical elements in the film was pretty fruitless. Instead, what I was presented with was a quirky, entertaining, if not entirely believable portrait of a high school, complete with the archetypes of the brilliant go-getter, the affable jock, the troubled teacher and the disillusioned rebel. It all adds up to an entertaining and, well, thought-provoking, if occasionally unrealistic, film.

The majority of the story centers around Tracy Flik, a high schooler whose eyes have been on the prize since infancy. That’s not surprising, given that her paralegal mother is the type to tell Tracy, when she needs consoling after an unsuccessful speech, that she should have added the parts her mother told her to and tried a little harder. Reese Witherspoon, coming off an excellent performance in last year’s Pleasantville, finds just the right balance of relentless ambition and romantic naivete in the brilliant but lonely Tracy. The best moments are when Tracy perceives a threat, such as Chris Klein’s presidential rival Paul Metzler: Tracy’s eyes widen with anger and disbelief at the hubris of Fate, and the soundtrack screams with something reminiscent of an Amazonian war cry.

The rest of the story is given over to Matthew Broderick’s Jim McAllister, a good teacher whose unhappiness with his mediocre existence causes him to self-destruct. While McAllister starts out as a likeable character, he soon becomes mired in adulterous desires for his neighbor, and this combined with his seemingly irrational dislike of Tracy turn him into a pitiable wretch. It’s a tribute to author Jim Taylor (who wrote the novel on which the film is based) and director Alexander Payne (who also co-wrote the screenplay) that by the end of the film, the audience is more apt to identify with the lonely Tracy than the pathetic McAllister. Broderick plays the role as well as could be expected for an actor who made his name playing affable fellows like Ferris Bueller.

A few other highlights including Klein’s saintly Metzler, who couldn’t possibly be any nicer, and his sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell), a rebel who, in the Perot role, enters the presidential race only to drop out later.

The film does suffer from a few flaws. Anytime you have more than ten minutes of voice-over narration in a movie, you’re asking for trouble, and the device does occasionally slow down the film, or plays awkwardly in key scenes. The lesbian angle of Tammy’s character, while handled quite sensitively and realistically, seems too much of a side-plot–as does McAllister’s adulterous longings–for a single film. Finally, there’s simply no way a brainy, goody-two-shoes loner like Tracy could even have a shot at winning a high school presidential election. Like Never Been Kissed, the high school world portrayed in Election just doesn’t ring true.

But these are minor flaws in an overall entertaining film. Witherspoon’s an absolute delight, and Klein and Campbell are fun to watch. Broderick plays his character adequately, and Payne keeps the story moving fairly quickly. In the end, Election reminds us that, though following your heart always seems like the right thing to do, there are always costs.

—05/23/99