Saturday, April 7, 2018

"Blockers"

  

Stop me if this sounds familiar: suburban Chicago (the affluent part), high school, humiliated kids, clueless parents. Blockers is firmly in John Hughes territory, and it aims to both tear down the same stereotypes Hughes mocked -- and upheld -- three decades ago, while affirming just how much some things about the high-school experience are never, ever going to change.

The unexpected thing about Blockers, though, is how it's not so much about the three high-school seniors who are ostensibly at its core, but about their parents. Maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise,  given how much Blockers is in the spirit of both Hughes and early Judd Apatow comedies. The youthful heroes of those movies were always going to grow up, and Blockers is the movie that springs naturally from their anxieties and fears.

It wouldn't be too hard, really, to imagine that Lisa, Mitchell and Hunter, the 40-something parents whose neuroses fuel Blockers, as the Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall characters from The Breakfast Club all grown up and with kids of their own. Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz, who play the parents, bear more than a passing resemblance, and maybe this is what happens to a generation that imagined themselves to be more liberal, more open-minded than their own parents: They grow up to be just as uptight and worried as the people who raised them.

Of course, they don't imagine themselves that way. They all think they're the cool parents, though their daughters would certainly disagree. Julie is the "pretty one," an only child whose mother dotes on her; Kayla is the sporty one, whose father bonds with her over athletics and whose mom takes a hands-off attitude; Sam is the shy, quiet one, embarrassed by both her self-absorbed mother and absent father.

Blockers takes place on their prom night, and the movie wastes precious little time setting up the characters and their predicaments: One of the best things about the movie is how it jumps right in and lets the characters find and form themselves over time.

There's rather a lot on the mind of Blockers -- the trouble parents have letting go, the perils teens have finding their own way, the pressures that are put on them to use sex (and drugs and alcohol) as ways of fitting in. All of that is there, and all of it is explored by director Kay Cannon in unexpected depth, but more than anything Blockers wants to make you laugh, and it does -- a lot, and consistently.

The humor in Blockers is bawdy, naughty and sometimes downright raunchy, but it almost never feels gratuitous, not even when one character consumes beer in a most unexpected way, another winds up inches away from a middle-aged penis, and another ends up in bed with a drug addict.

Put in those terms, Blockers seems, well, inappropriate at best and straining for laughs at worst, and yet it's neither; it's weirdly sweet, and it's always working hard for some pretty big laughs.  The adult actors -- Mann, Cena and Barinholtz -- work spectacularly well together, and the movie hits the pause button on the crude stuff just long enough for a serious reality check: This is a movie about high schoolers having sex, made in the era of #MeToo and at a time when there's some really interesting reflection going on about those indispensable-but-sometimes-questionable Hughes films.  (If you haven't read it, this essay by Molly Ringwald is fascinating, and seems perfectly timed for the release of Blockers.) A scene in which one of the girls' moms (played by Sarayu Blue) questions the sanity of the other adults is just about perfect, and keeps the laughs coming.

What the parents are trying to do, by the way, is stop their kids from having sex, a premise that could, and maybe should, come across as lurid but seems eminently reasonable given the way these people have approached the rearing of their children in the first place.

For most of the film, the kids have no idea what their parents are up to, and the only time the movie loses just a little bit of its momentum is when everyone figures it out.

The rest of the time, Blockers is most noteworthy less for its wacky concept than for the way it treats all three of the girls with immense respect, as wholly formed people who have their own specific perspectives and foibles.  The actresses who play them, Kathryn Newton (Julie), Geraldine Viswanathan (Kayla) and Gideon Adlon (Sam), have created three wonderfully realized characters.  They could be front and center in their own movie, and this is a rare film that warrants a sequel: It would be fun to see how the three of them fare after the credits roll.

But as much as Blockers proudly shows off three young women who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, it's mostly about the parents who are struggling to see their daughters grow up. The lengths they'll go to in order to prevent time from moving forward, to stop the world from changing, are a little ridiculous, sometimes outrageous -- the way all of us act when we realize time is passing right by us.

Those kids are going to grow up, whether we're ready or not, which is exactly what they've always done.




Viewed April 7, 2018 -- Laemmle Noho

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1 comment:

  1. vexmovies - What a great movie, I was surprised to see people understand that juvenile sex is wrong by watching that film, it's the exact opposite, it just says not to rush into things just to get it over with ! Gender equality is very present, the protagonists -adults and teens- are fun, hilarious and moving, it's a great movie!
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