They had me until the end.
Never Been Kissed, like so many coulda-shoulda-woulda-been-good movies, starts out strong. Then it loses its nerve in the third act, substituting a fuzzy emotional spectacle for a coherent conclusion.
Credit where due: Drew Barrymore is flat-out terrific as Josie Geller, a newspaper copy editor sent back to high school to write an undercover expose. (For the moment, we’ll overlook the unlikeliness of that premise.)
During her own high school years, Josie was so unpopular she was regularly subjected to vicious humiliation. She sees her assignment as a chance to erase those painful memories and join the top rung of the high-school hierarchy.
Once enrolled, however, Josie finds she fits in better with the brainy, calculus-loving crowd called the Denominators, led by Aldys (Leelee Sobieski).
Her bosses, however, order her to hang out in wilder social circles, and outfit her with a miniature video camera to track her progress. Josie’s brother (David Arquette) follows her back to school, where he convinces the in-crowd that Josie is in fact cool enough to be prom queen.
Ms. Barrymore plays out the transformation with a fine balance of emotional need and comic sensibility; she uses Josie’s physical clumsiness in particular to hilarious effect.
But in the end, things go all wrong, and the worst of it is this: The movie denies Josie the courage of her insights, even after she defies her bosses on behalf of the teacher (Michael Vartan) who has won her heart.
On the one hand, she crosses over to full adulthood by seeing through the superficial, appearance-driven caste system in high school. On the other, she deliberately stages her first act of intimate connection with a man as a kind of reprise of the high school prom. This highly contrived moment — an act of pure juvenile fantasy — takes place in front of a cheering audience, a stadium full of the same people whose values she has just rejected. What, can someone tell me precisely, is up with that?
What’s more, she waxes nostalgic about the whole high school gang, including the patently loathsome leader of the rat-pack, Guy (Jeremy Jordan), whose cruelty to Aldys echoes the torture of the younger Josie.
They brought her so far, why couldn’t they let her really grow up?
More movie reviews...
