At one point in Easy A, its heroine Olive (Emma Stone) declares that she wished she lived in an '80s movie. Having embroiled herself in a sexless sex-scandal thanks to a little white lie about losing her virginity, Olive yearns for a little chaste romance -for John Cusack to show up at her window blaring some Peter Gabriel. Let’s leave to one side the fact that Olive is a little young for these films to be her defining cinematic moments and blame misplaced nostalgia for her skewed view of the oeuvre of John Huston and James Cameron; even in '80s movies, the kids weren’t as squeamish about sex as they are in Easy A.
Easy A takes place in a high school whose Mean Girl-style ruling clique are promise ring wearing, Christian Right blowhards and where a pretty girl losing her virginity is a major scandal. Nobody in this neighbourhood is getting lucky. In fact, over the course of the movie the only characters who engage in non-fictional relations (school counsellor Lisa Kudrow and a thankfully of age student) end up with a nasty STI. You would think American Pie had never happened.
All of which made me question who the movie is for. The trailer paints it as a sassy, sexy teen comedy but sadly the teens in question are bizarrely repressed. Even the usually beguiling Emma Stone is left swimming against the stream. Despite her Scarlet Letter posturing, Olive is a bit of a downer. When she adopts a new voracious persona she seems sad and desperate rather than anarchic and fun.
On the opposite end of that scale are the adults, who are presented as witty, intelligent and open in their attitudes to sex. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson completely steal the show as Olive’s parents, having more life to them than all of the teenage cast combined. These performances (along with Thomas Haden Church as a snarky English teacher) save the film but for an Emma Stone vehicle, following Superbad and Zombieland, Easy A just feels strange. An evolutionary blip in the progress of the teen movie which is nowhere near as fun as it could have been.