Emma Seligman’s sophomore effort has a few sweet moments peppered through the whole production, but audiences wanting a solid update to the lesbian coming-of-age story can look elsewhere.
Bottoms
Directed by Emma Seligman, Starring Rachel Sennot, Ayo Edebiri, Marshawn Lynch
Runtime: 1 hr 32 mins
Synopsis
High schoolers PJ (Rachel Sennot) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) want to hook up with some of their fellow classmates, but are too awkward and lacking in the self-confidence to do so – until they inadvertently create a school fight club through a series of lies and misunderstandings, leading them to actual feminine solidarity
Is This Typical High School Fare?
This film displays all the hallmarks of your usual coming-of-age, high school stories: focus on 2 to 3 key protagonists – usually childhood friends – that are attempting to take the next step in their lives, whether it be pursuing a relationship, getting into college, getting a car, making that cross country trip before your lives change forever, etc. However, like many problematic elements that have plagued this genre in the past, Bottoms fails to learn from any of them and emulates many of their worse qualities.
Take our two protagonists PJ and Josie for example: neither of them feel particularly redeemable and it makes it hard to root for their actions with their fellow classmates. We can identify with them out of a similar sense of longing or understanding – how much it sucks trying to express your feelings at a young age…but they need to have character traits that we can latch onto, seeing some progress in their journey, even if there’s steps backwards in that process.
Credit: Orion Pictures
PJ is written as a monstrous friend, like many of the uber-extroverted protagonists in movie history. They can get away with nearly anything through sheer charisma while quietly (or loudly) bullying their meeker friends. What’s worse, they end up dragging those friends down because they don’t have the nerve to push back, eventually normalizing the behavior. It’s incredibly similar to the problems romantic comedies run into, especially when they lean on raunchier tropes, because they fail to write solid characters and instead create horrific caricatures no one should root for.
Through this dynamic, we may be more sympathetic towards Josie’s inability to stand up to PJ, however it also repeats harmful tropes that takes away agency or responsibility from characters who need to grow and assert themselves instead of using their meekness as an excuse. This dynamic routinely masks terrible behavior because we’re more focused on how the nerdier character is being treated instead of recognizing their own patterns.
While Bottoms at least recognizes that core issue when the duo have their predictable falling out, that’s all it is: a recognition with no exploration. Needing a tight runtime and buttoned up ending, none of these problems will be confronted in any meaningful way, always to be played up for laughs. I’m not singling out Seligman for this, as it’s been a common problem in this niche for such a long time, but it’s disappointing for a film that’s decidedly more progressive and marketed towards a similar audience to see these elements persist.
Bottoms shines best when it’s presenting the complications of being an LGBTQ teenager in the modern day and the confusion that can come from navigating that space. Both Josie and PJ have a hard time figuring out who’s straight or not, inevitably leading to several awkward moments where you feel for deeply for PJ and Josie. My screening had audible groans or nervous laughter from audience members who understood that plight and saw it coming from a mile away. Despite the way both characters are characterized throughout the rest of the film, these moments are given enough time to breathe and along with a few “bloody” laughs later on, save this film from its less developed elements.
Tonally Confusing Stream of Comedic Consciousness
Now to be fair, a movie about a high school fight club should clearly tip you off on the direction it will take, much like its raunchy predecessors. However, most of those films aren’t attempting to make bigger insights other than simplistic explorations of adolescence.
For example, there’s a scene where the fight club takes a moment to share their experiences together, but rather than write solid jokes, the film just devolves into one liner after one liner. There’s a great joke about the issue of gray area rape culture that could have setup some fantastic follow up lines or exploration, but no sooner than it’s been uttered by PJ, we’re already onto the next joke. Laughter is definitely a medicine that can be used to process trauma, but given the nature of sexual assault, I would think crafting a joke on it would demand more attention and care to make sure it lands well; here Bottoms fails miserably in a key scene that everyone could have been talking about.
Credit: Orion Pictures
However, that type of comedy has become par for the course for modern comedies – in what I call a stream of comedic consciousness style – where there’s very little joke setup and we’re just expected to laugh at a grab-bag of sentences and words thrown on the screen. It’s the primary reason many modern comedies, with the exception of a handful, aren’t really memorable. Sure, these raunchy comedies may have received a few shock value laughs when they released, but they aren’t really making an impact in our minds because there’s no actual jokes to react to. Again in being fair to Seligman, this isn’t a new phenomenon but it doesn’t help the flaws in this movie
Where Bottoms sort of succeeds is being completely ridiculous everywhere else: Again, a fight club in a high school is a crazy premise, so the movie wisely leans into that, being completely bloody with punches, letting women get hit hard, even treading into Anchorman (2004) territory with some deaths near the end. Once you realize the movie’s tone, these become some of the best moments in the film.
Conclusion / Recommendation
If you don’t mind the rough edges and jokes being off the mark here and there, Bottoms will satisfy many younger fans craving for more representation on screen. But this is probably one you can skip and wait until it’s available on streaming or rental somewhere this fall.
Score: 6.5 out of 10
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