Tuesday, March 18, 2008

SXSW movie review: Assassination of a High School President

It played at Sundance; it played at SXSW; now it's coming to AFI Dallas.

By John P. Meyer

Like all the best counterculture high school comedy movies (Ferris Bueller, Brick, Charlie Bartlett), Brett Simon's sly and painfully hip Assassination of a High School President refuses to take itself - or anything else - very seriously. It's a broadly-satirical lampoon of Catholic private school life more concerned with being funny/wise than with being true to its noir underpinnings - and for those who prefer comedic substance to artful style, that's a good thing.

"Any room on your dance card?" The principal asks Bobby for some help ferreting out test paper thieves.

The grand scheme joke is this: Bobby Funke (played with a well-integrated blend of social discomfort and straight-ahead self-confidence by Reece Thompson) is a sophomore school-paper-writer wannabe whose only roadblock to getting his journalistic career kick-started is the fact that he hasn't yet actually written anything. His editor (sexy Melonie Diaz, fresh from Be Kind, Rewind) lays on him the busywork assignment of a bio piece about St. Donovan's student body president (and all around popular guy) Paul Moore (Patrick Taylor). During the course of this assignment, Bobby becomes embroiled in a deeply-layered plot involving the theft of SAT exam papers from the principal's office.

All this is told to the accompaniment of hard-boiled Dashiell Hammett cynical-and-proud-of-it style narration, with the fate of the test papers (and the characters involved in their pilferage and recovery) elevated to the status of high drama. (Which - as anyone who's ever attended high school will tell you - pertains to everything that goes on there, while you're embroiled in it.)

In the course of his investigative journalistic pursuits, Bobby grills Paul's little sister, Chrissy (young Gabrielle Brennan, doing a good job of acting the precocious princess), who feeds him insider info in return for stuffed unicorns; and the slutty school nurse (played with leg-uncrossing aplomb by Cold Case's Kathryn Morris), who has a habit of popping out for fast food whenever patients arrive in her office.

Ouch. (Mischa Barton is so pretty, it hurts.)

But the focus of Bobby's investigation falls firmly (and delightfully) upon Paul's erstwhile girlfriend, Francesca (Mischa Barton, whose elegant stems do wonders for the Catholic school short-skirt uniform look - as if it needed any help). Through a series of encounters and misadventures, Bobby falls under Francesca's intoxicating spell, leading him into all sorts of faux-dramatic trouble, most notably during the beer pong competition at an after-school party.

All the thematic elements demanded by the genre (school bullies with a flair for the dramatic, introverted outsiders discovering their worth, virginal male lead in the process of becoming un-virginal) are gracefully in play, including the enigmatic principal (played here by a stony-faced Bruce Willis) who runs his school with an ex-Desert Storm officer's iron fist.

Providing comic relief from all the... um... comedy is Josh Pais as Spanish teacher Senor Newell. In Senor Newell's class you won't be allowed anything unless you request it en Español - even if you're the principal. Also diverting are Bobby's encounters with the Department of Motor Vehicles lady (Laura Ford), who can't understand how Bobby can demonstrate adherence to the rules of the road at one moment, then jump the tracks entirely in the next. As a result of his disastrous performance on driving tests, Bobby's mode of transport during the narrative is confined to the self-powered two-wheeled variety - that, and shank's mare.

Bobby looks stunned here either because a) Francesca's asked him to accompany her to the prom, or b) she's just compared him to Wolf Blitzer.

The action in this 91-minute movie clips along nicely with few noticeable pacing problems - the interest level is kept high in part by the snappy and intelligent dialog (credit writers Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski), and also by the adrenalized scoring, which - it turns out - director Simon is still in the process of finalizing.

SETTING THE DRAGNET TONE: "The name's Bobby Funke - I write for the paper."

WOULDN'T WANNA BE LIKE YOU: "You're like the school's Wolf Blitzer now." - Francesca to Bobby, after publication of his investigative piece on school president Paul Moore.

WOULD WANNA BE LIKE YOU: "I am so gonna corrupt you." - Francesca to Bobby, at an after-school party

PITHY IS AS PITHY DOES: "Nobody's misunderstood - it's just what they say when they don't like who they are." - Francesca to Bobby

CHINATOWN HOMAGE: "Forget it, Funke - it's high school." - Editor (Melonie Diaz) to Bobby

**********

A Q/A was held following the screening (which took place in Austin's Paramount Theatre), with director Brett Simon, writers Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski and lead actor Reece Thompson in attendance.

Simon ambles out onto stage wearing flip-flops and appearing as laid back as one of the slacker characters who show up for the Usual Suspects-style principal's office lineup in a scene from his movie. He says the most memorable scenes to shoot were the ones involving Bruce Willis, of whom he was a bit in awe.

Simon saw Reece Thompson's performance in Rocket Science and thought he might be too nerdy for the role of Bobby - but on the basis of a video audition sent to him by Mr. Thompson, he changed his mind and ended up casting him. Reece says he watched Sunset Boulevard to prepare for his dialog delivery style.

We learn that writers Calpin and Jadubowski both attended Catholic private schools, adding to the verisimilitude of the world portrayed in the film. Furthermore, in order to acquire the contemporary youthful idiom, they "hung around in high schools a lot."

"Making a movie is a lot like high school," concludes Simon. "Extreme joy and extreme despair in a 20-minute period."

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