Eighth Grade (2018)

[Simon Boccanegra]

An indie critics' darling, now available for rental/streaming on various platforms, and endorsed by no less than Molly Ringwald as an uncommonly good film about the adolescent experience. I Vudu'd it.  

In the middle section of this film, the young protagonist, Kayla, gets to hang out with a high-school senior as part of a shadow program, and the older girl's friends (around 16-17) talk about the vast gulf separating present-day seniors and present-day eighth graders. One boy exaggerates that Kayla is from a "completely different generation." He cites such supporting data as her already having had Snapchat when she was in the fifth grade.

All the rapid changes in technology and media do make it seem that generations are being subdivided in ways they never were before. Any kind of school was a long time ago for me, so this very well-observed, very "now" film about adolescence presented me with much that was a world away from my own experience, but it all felt authentic. Sometimes that authenticity was tinged with grimness. The kids go through a "school shooter drill" with the same nonchalance my classes showed for fire/tornado drills ("Now, what do you do if you hear gunshots in the distance?" Kids in bored unison: "Run in the opposite direction!"). 

But for every moment like that, there are two or three that ring true in a timeless and universal way, and I think there will be the same feelings of recognition from female and male viewers. The first-time writer/director, Massachusetts-born Bo Burnham, was only 27 when he completed his work, but he gets so much right with his heroine, who is having an unhappy middle-school experience. She is not bullied or overtly mistreated but ignored, unseen. Kayla suffers from acne and severe social anxiety, and she can do more to conceal one condition than the other. Sometimes she nervously goes on for one sentence too long ("By the way, I like your shirt a lot. It's so cool. I…have a shirt, too…"), and we can see how stupid and embarrassed she feels. When she works up her courage to make a phone call, she paces incessantly for the whole duration of it. All that has changed from 30 years ago is that there is no cord to get tangled up in. But Burnham gets the happy moments as right as he gets the pathos. There is a honey of a scene in which Kayla and another shy kid bond when they realize they both love the same TV show, and now they have a bunch of things to say because they can quote favorite lines.     

Burnham is perceptive and nonjudgmental about the centrality of social media to kids who never have known life without it, kids who have owned smartphones for as long as they have been able to talk on the phone. Kayla uses all the apps, and also posts YouTube videos in which she gives advice on things like being yourself, being confident, "putting yourself out there a little more." She sometimes ends these tutorials with pleas for viewers to share her videos or subscribe to her channel—her audience is virtually nonexistent. The videos are really an exercise in self-coaching and self-affirmation, and she later admits that she is in no position to give advice on any of these subjects. Before there was YouTube, young people used LiveJournal this way, to make themselves seem together and expressive in ways they really wanted to be. Burnham gives Kayla a beautifully written (and representative) line to sum up what life is like for an anxious, unpopular middle schooler: "I'm waiting in line for, like, a roller coaster, and that stupid, like, butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling you get, like...I get that all the time, and then I never get the feeling of after you ride the roller coaster."  

This material could have been played for laughs, or it could have gone turgid or melodramatic. There are two points in the film when we really are afraid for Kayla, one with a boy her age who requests a nude picture of her, the other with a boy a few years older who wants something more hands-on. But Burnham's tonal choice is interesting, and unexpected considering that he began in stand-up comedy. He takes us through a rocky couple of weeks with a girl we can see is on her way to becoming an interesting young woman, and the tone he maintains throughout is sober, sensible, grounded. There are moments of wistfulness and adolescent heartbreak, but the material never is given tragic weight it cannot support. He gets lovely performances from young Elsie Fisher as Kayla and from Josh Hamilton (a Gen-X "Hawke alternative" of the '90s, now a solid character actor in films like Lonergan's Margaret and Manchester by the Sea) as her single dad, almost palpably loving and proud but so often having no idea what to say to a daughter of this age. 

This is one I expect people will discover as the years go by.  

Edited January 21, 2019 by Simon Boccanegra