It is also a kind of utopian vision of what high school could be like—while the animosities are there at the beginning of the film, they are transcended by the end once everyone actually gets to know each other. Like The Breakfast Club, this is a film with a deep faith in democracy and liberalism (in the classic sense of the word). If everyone could just have a conversation and get into some adventures together, the film suggests, we could overcome our prejudices while still retaining our differences.
While most of the reviews have been uniformly positive, I found Richard Brody’s mixed review in The New Yorker to be one of the most interesting. He begins by situating it within the contemporary cultural moment:
I find this reading useful, although I ultimately disagree with Brody’s political assessment. His claim that this is a “counterfactual comedy about a world minus Trumpism” is suggestive, as if the film takes place in a kind of science fictional alternate universe without demagoguery, Fox News, and right-wing populism. (This may not be unique to this particular film, either: I wonder if this would be a useful way of analyzing the class content of the John Hughes films in relation to the dominant Reagan ideology.)Some films embody the Trump era, some confront it, and still others ignore its existence. “Booksmart,” the first feature directed by Olivia Wilde, is in a stranger category: it’s a counterfactual comedy about a world minus Trumpism, in which ostensible blue-state values prevail, without the slightest whiff of hatreds, enmities, or hostilities, except for those caused by personal misunderstandings that are easily and quickly corrected. As a form of wish fulfillment, it’s fascinating if unpersuasive; as a vision of its subject—high-school life—it’s as faux-sweet and faux-innocent as the films of the Frankie Avalon era.
It is also worth clarifying that the film takes place in an upscale California suburb. As a portrait of young people in such a space—especially young women—the film’s surface-level politics actually feel right to me. I think that one could make a fairly persuasive case that the major blue-state cities are an actually-existing counterfactual to Trumpism, at least on a cultural level. So while the film could be criticized for obscuring the country’s real ideological division, which is largely geographical, this division is probably not a significant factor in the lives of the characters who are being depicted. (Another sidebar: it would be fascinating to think about how movie distribution reflects these larger geographical divisions. Given that rural areas have many less screens than suburban or urban ones, is this film even likely to play in really Trumpy areas?)
Even if it did take place in an alternate universe, I don’t think that makes the film less valuable. Aren’t high school comedies supposed to be wish fulfillment, at least to a certain degree? Usually this is registered on the level of the individual character: the nerd who gets the girl, the idiots who pass the test, the underdogs who win the game. In Brody’s reading, the wish fulfilment elements in Booksmart are instead larger cultural ones: the depiction of a world of racial and sexual diversity, a high school in which all the oddballs and goofs have secure futures, a world of tolerance and understanding. This worldview is registered in the film’s comedic form: this is a film in which the jokes are good-natured, not cruel; everyone in the film has a sense of humor about themselves, so we are always laughing with them and not at them. In a world in which our president is an unfunny insult comic, this itself strikes me as an important political act.
