2.5 stars. Rating: R, for pervasive strong crude and sexual content, graphic dialogue, drug and alcohol use, and constant profanity, all involving teens
By Derrick Bang
Back in the day, youthful sexual
explorations followed a common sports metaphor, starting with reaching first
base and concluding with the obvious home run.
My, how things have changed.
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| At first, Fiona (Alia Shawkat, right) shares good friend Brandy's (Aubrey Plaza) elation over the progress being made on her summer list of planned sexual accomplishments. But like the so-called comedy in this film, Brandy eventually takes things too far, at which point Fiona demonstrates that while she might talk the talk, she apparently doesn't think much of people who walk the walk. |
In these sexually liberated and
quite raunchy days of the 21st century, that simple baseball metaphor has
blossomed into the complexity of a 22-level video game. Libido-driven folks
keeping score begin with quaint French kisses and hickies, progress through
once-unspoken acts such as motorboating and teabagging, and ultimately, ah,
climax with the horizontal bop itself.
At least, that’s what
writer/director Maggie Carey would have us believe, with her smutty teen sex
comedy, The To Do List.
Sadly, this new film is neither
as witty nor as memorable as 2010’s Easy
A, which made a star of Emma Stone, and to which The To Do List inevitably will be compared. While this new film’s
star — the richly talented and still under-appreciated Aubrey Plaza — deserves
a similar breakout hit, she won’t get it here. Carey’s film is too uneven, too
clumsy and (to its detriment) too reflexively coarse, in the manner of various
Judd Apatow or Farrelly brothers guys-behaving-badly yock-fests.
Ironically, Carey’s biggest
problem is that she doesn’t have the courage to pursue her genre convictions.
Her script is plenty dirty, but only at a potty-mouth level the Three Stooges
would appreciate. She never achieves genuine heat or eroticism, and too many of
Plaza’s fellow cast members work beneath their talents, their line readings
stiff, unpersuasive and motivated more by writer’s fiat than narrative rational.
We should perhaps ask the basic
question: Is this film intended to be genuinely sexy, or merely filthy? Because
if the former was Carey’s intention, to any
degree, she fouled out before reaching first base.
Her story is set in 1993,
apparently to avoid granting its characters any exposure to the Internet porn
that has become readily available since then. We meet the over-achieving Brandy
Klark (Plaza) as she graduates from high school and gives a roundly jeered
valedictory speech. Whatever her academic accomplishments, she has become
infamous as both a teacher’s pet and a virgin, the latter epithet apparently
far more heinous than the former.
Despite being a social pariah,
Brandy has two gal pals — Fiona (Alia Shawkat) and Wendy (Sarah Steele) — who
like her but agree that she could, well, loosen up a bit. To hear Fiona and
Wendy talk, they’ve either performed or contemplated every act once relegated
to the Kama Sutra or Dr. David
Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to
Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).
One suspects this may be nothing but talk; indeed, a third-act crisis
results when Fiona and Wendy realize that Brandy has taken them word for
debased word. But if this means Fiona and Wendy didn’t really mean anything of what they suggested ...
well, Carey never makes that distinction. To her story’s detriment.
Anyway, taking her cue from her
friends’ encouragement, Brandy decides that — before entering college in
September, as a freshman — she really must become more, ah, experienced.
She receives help — in terms of
establishing the all-essential, 22-point “to do” list of desired “skills” —
from her contemptuous older sister, Amber (Rachel Bilson). Big sis is a
foul-mouthed, full-time slut who’s a profound disappointment to their father
(Clark Gregg), a local judge — nothing is made of this profession, beyond its
mere mention — who displays the puritanical censure, in all matters sexual, of
a chaste nun.
On the other hand, Mrs. Klark
(Connie Britton) is much more hip, and her unexpected candor prompts quite a
few giggles, thanks to the juxtaposition between Britton’s cheerful, Mom-type
calm, and the explicitness of her parental advice.
Although objectively willing to
discover and embrace her bad self, Brandy doesn’t develop genuine passion for
this challenge until bumping into hunky Rusty Waters (Scott Porter). Thanks to
a summer job as lifeguard at the local public pool, Brandy is granted constant
exposure to Rusty’s constantly exposed bod: a delectable potential “partner”
for the final line-item on her list.
As is typical of such stories,
the poster-perfect Rusty out-classes poor Cameron (Johnny Simmons), the
longtime friend Brandy always has treated as a platonic buddy, having failed to
notice that he has worshipped her from afar, lo these many years.
The final key ingredient in this
hormonal bouillabaisse is Willy (Bill Hader), an older slacker who manages the
aforementioned pool (and whose character therefore is a close cousin to the
role Sam Rockwell plays in The Way, Way
Back). Hader is the one actor who matches Plaza’s comic timing, and
occasionally tops it; he’s hilarious.
He’s funny because Willy occupies
a slightly sideways portion of Brandy’s summer hijinks, and has almost nothing
to do with her vice-laden mission. In other words, he’s a reasonably credible
character, rather than a one-dimensional walking libido.
Shawkat and Steele make a good
double act: The former has a naughty, scheming air that makes Fiona look
capable of just about anything, while Steele’s Wendy seems sweet and angelic
until she opens her mouth and uncorks another unexpectedly earthy observation.
Bilson overplays the potty-mouthed
shrike card, her rendering of Amber too one-dimensionally shrill, and the
usually memorable Christopher Mintz-Plasse is wasted in a throwaway part as
Duffy, Cameron’s best friend. As for Cameron himself, Simmons has some choice
moments as the eternally frustrated “good guy” who wants to be noticed for all
the right reasons.
Like Apatow and the Farrelly
boys, Carey frequently elicits groans for the display of taboo bodily fluids,
particularly those leaking or expelled at inopportune moments. Such moments may
register on the funny-because-they’re-gross meter, but Carey gets
better-deserved laughs at other moments; many involve Hader, and a few concern
some of the wide-eyed adolescents who populate the public pool, and can’t believe the great stuff they’re hearing
and seeing during this particular summer.
But as Brandy drinks and
debauches her way through the summer months, initially apprehensively but with
increased enthusiasm, she quickly develops an entirely different sort of bad
reputation, this time among the people who mean the most to her.
And that’s a problem: not so much
within this story’s thin framework, but in terms of the unbalanced tone Carey
takes. After encouraging her protagonist to yield to every sexual temptation
for nearly 90 minutes, often in slapstick fashion, Carey clumsily inserts a
heavy-handed, real-world “lesson” that sounds like it was scripted by the Moral
Majority. Apparently, this little sermon is intended to compensate for
everything that has gone before, and demonstrate that Brandy has Learned An
Important Lesson.
It doesn’t work, and not only
because Plaza, despite her comic timing, can’t make her eleventh-hour “purity
diatribe” sound the slightest bit genuine. No, the major hiccup is that all
these characters have been little more than sex-crazed cartoons up to this
point, and Carey suddenly wants us to “feel” for them as real people.
Tilt.
Doesn’t work that way. If Carey
wants that sort of ethical reckoning, she needs to better layer Brandy, her
friends and family from the get-go. As it stands, this film’s conclusion feels
like a cheat, or a take-back: much like a career Catholic sinner who “recants”
everything in Confession, and walks away with a Get-Out-of-Hell-Free card. Phooey.
Carey comes to us from TV work,
most notably Funny or Die Presents; The To Do List is her debut big-screen
feature. Like Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s The
Way, Way Back, Carey’s script wound up on Hollywood’s annual “Black List”
of the industry’s best unproduced screenplays, a few years back. Carey had
written the script with New York City improv troupe colleague Plaza in mind,
and the rising actress joined a staged reading at the 2010 Austin Film
Festival.
That audience loved it;
flash-forward a bit, to this big-screen disappointment. Let’s just say that
Carey didn’t make the most of her moment, the way Faxon and Rash did.
I’ve long noticed that title
credits often indicate the quality of what follows: the more clever the credits
— and The To Do List has the best
I’ve seen for awhile — the better the film. Alas, my little handicapper let me
down this time; aside from genuine chuckles here and there, the credits are the
best part of Carey’s movie.
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