Coming-of-age movies about the anxieties of being a middle-American teenager are increasingly common in recent years. To the point I was tempering my expectations for Eighth Grade, the directorial debut of comedian and musician Bo Burnham, and its ability to bring anything new to the genre. However the subject matter has rich potential. There’s been a ton of movies like this focussed on characters at the high school level and relatively few in middle school; and after all the last movie I saw written and directed by a mediocre comedian was Don’t Think Twice, one of my favourite films of 2016. Eighth Grade isn’t that good, nor does it have the strength and soul of something like Lady Bird, but it is a cogent and honest expression of that uncomfortable period in our youth.
It’s about Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), an introverted and miserable thirteen year old girl in the last week of eighth grade at her local middle school. She has a disparaging attitude towards her single father (Josh Hamilton), a crush on her class troublemaker, and resents the conceited popular girl of their school. But with only days left before graduation, she tries to make strides for relationships and build confidence.
As with many a similar film, Eighth Grade is a slice-of-life story, without much of a conventional plot or direction, consisting of a series of largely self-contained episodes linked through unique transitions of YouTube videos Kayla creates. In these sequences where she’s monologuing with uncertainty to her audience we get a good sense of her personality. Burnham’s a competent director (though he loves his back tracking shots a bit too much), but he’s a much better writer. He very much authentically captures the thirteen year old voice, which in 2018 isn’t too far removed from what it was when he and I were that age. The dialogue is incredibly naturalistic, conversations and talking points real and unconstrained, and the comedy, as it should for subject matter about kids at this point in their lives, is very much awkward humour: interactions with her father over dinner where he presses her to open up as she repels and shuns his attempts, weird ramblings with a kid at a party she’s only meeting for the first time, or just her trying to talk to people.
But Burnham’s script certainly wouldn’t be as effective without Elsie Fisher’s performance. If parts of her dialogue weren’t ad libbed she does a stellar job making every anxious thought process or meandering tangent look organic. It’s not just her delivery, but her body language and expressiveness (or lack thereof) that paints the picture of this insecure girl at a crossroads, dispensing advice for tweens online without ever applying it to herself. And in one of those cases where you don’t notice it’s missing from a lot of movies until something like Eighth Grade actually includes it, Kayla has acne, blackheads, and facial blemishes usually covered by make-up. It’s never addressed as one of her issues, but the films’ refusal to cover it up subtly indicates it is, as well once more demonstrating a dedication to realism. Josh Hamilton is pretty good as her father, and Emily Robinson is a notable presence as a high school girl Kayla befriends as part of a shadow program.
Though the premonition of high school is on the horizon, the film really is all about middle school and accurately transports you back to that time. All the markers of that awkward cusp of teenagehood are present, even if you didn’t go to the conventional American middle school depicted here. Everyone will recognize something, even a relatively small thing, from their own thirteen year old experience. That being said, it’s a movie about that experience in the modern day. So it includes things like a school shooting drill, an alien necessity outside the United States, and the hyper prominence of internet culture. And Burnham, who started out on YouTube, really understands the internet and its relationship to the kids who’ve always had it, showing both its positive and negative effects, as well as its constant place in their everyday lives. Nothing’s going to make you feel old like hearing high school kids and Kayla contrast what social media platforms first appeared when they were in a particular grade. But it speaks to the truth that everyone thinks they’re better for having had less technology when they were younger than the kids of today.
Eighth Grade plays on a lot of the same developmental points that you see in other coming-of-age movies and is quite predictable, but its superb leading performance, really solid script, and authentic grasp on that period of life makes it well worth a watch. It’s a harsh but sympathetic examination of that weird, difficult time, and despite its ironic R-rating, is a movie that may bring comfort, reflection, and even some hope to eighth graders all over.
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