Eighth Grade

2018 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The final days of 8th grade for an awkward teenager.

Bo Burnham's directorial debut never dips into cliches as his character navigates the befuddling waters of adolescence. He creates this character so lovingly; you can tell he loves this character like he'd love his own daughter. That helps the viewer also fall in love with the character. There are all sorts of moments when I expected Burnham to fall into coming-of-age traps, to lean on the tried and true methods utilized in the last thirty years with this sub-genre. Maybe it comes close in a scene with a pair of characters and a fire, but by the time the story gets there, those two characters are so lovable that it's impossible not to buy into what's happening there. And, of course, I teared up.

I also appreciated that Burnham resists creating characters who are mean. The film's antagonists are either other human beings who are simply aloof, absorbed into the sea of social media and technological goop, or they're the abstract forces that make life at this age impossibly awkward. You get the sense that if Burnham had decided to follow any of the peripheral characters instead of Kayla, we'd get a lot of parallels, the same sort of awkward parent/child moments, similar moments where the character is trying to figure things out, and the realization that all 21st Century teens, just like teenagers from likely any time period, find it necessary to adapt these pretend versions of themselves in both public and private places.

Instead of being mean, the other teenagers in this are more like alien creatures who Kayla has to figure out and whose culture she has to acclimate to. There's a great montage at a pool party where Kayla, her discomfort and fears exhibited in her stumbling gait and slouched shoulders, emerges from the house in her swimsuit and observes the other kids. They're doing what middle school kids do--turning their eyelids inside-out, performing clumsy handstands in the pool, spitting pool water through their tooth gaps. They're ungainly, sometimes goggled creatures, and their closest cinematic equivalent would be the characters in Browning's Freaks. Only stranger, more alien.

Elsie Fisher's great in this. She's got this perfectly natural naivete and awkward charm. I liked the onscreen relationship with the father played by Josh Hamilton. He's not an antagonist in this story, but like all fathers of teen girls, he does things that antagonize, and he's often just as awkward and lost as his daughter. The dad's a great character, and I don't think it would be a terrible idea for Burnham's next film to be the same exact time period told from his point of view. I wrongly suspected that a parent of one of Kayla's classmates had an interest in him, so maybe that's something that could be explored.

I have to say this--I laughed out loud more times while watching this than anything in recent memory. A lot of that was the influence of the audience in the packed theater. They were really into it, and I guess their laughter was infectious. I used to be able to sit in grumpy silence while people around me laughed, but I'm apparently losing that ability.