Bottoms

Bottoms is a difficult movie to approach if you’re not already steeped in its world. Emma Seligman is one of a handful of Gen Z filmmakers on the rise, and with them comes a sensibility and pacing heavily influenced by a life lived online. A break-neck pace, absurdism, riffing on story and character tropes, frank about all things but especially sex, and referential without being deferential. The combination of all signal the coming wave of young filmmakers looking to buck the conventions of earlier eras, while simultaneously borrowing from and tipping their hat to them. All of which is to say I cannot imagine how this movie plays for older audiences, who are maybe less familiar with their style.

Which isn’t to say such films shouldn’t be made. No, far from it. It may reduce audience reach, but that will change with time. It simply is the new generation continuing to plant their flag and announce their arrival, same as any new generation. They’re very loudly ignoring the conventions people expect them to follow, carving out the niche they aim to fill. And it’s doing pretty okay at the box office, so it seems to be finding its crowd.

Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennott) are unpopular high school seniors, both desperate to make an impression on their cheerleader crushes, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber). An incident with star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) snowballs into rumors and their creation of an all women fight club…excuse me, self-defense club. Their hope is it will bring them into close contact with Isabel and Brittany, a ploy which begins to pay dividends when Isabel learns Jeff is cheating on her.

The whole time, the school is gearing up for a rivalry football game against Huntington High School, which happens only once a decade or so. Concerned all this drama will hurt Jeff’s performance in the big game, Tim (Miles Fowler) is intent on discovering and exposing the girls’ lies.

Now, when I lay the plot out like that, it sounds fairly conventional. The fight club thing’s a bit odd, sure, but that’s it. Which just goes to show how much execution really matters. Because this movie is unhinged.

That “incident” with Jeff? The girls’ car rolls at 0.5 MPH into his shin, and he drops to the ground, weeping like a baby, which causes the whole football team to come running across the fairground to cradle him like an infant, and he shows up to school the next day with crutches. Their teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch - yes, that Marshawn Lynch, Beast Mode himself) is openly reading a porn magazine in the middle of the day called “Divorced & Happy”. And at a pep rally just before the game, the football team stages a fight in the middle of the school gym between Hazel (Ruby Cruz) and the top boxer in order to show that the fight club sucks.

So despite its rather conventional structure, the details which fill it all in are completely insane.

Which leads us to its fundamental issue: you can feel the wild story straining against the traditional plot beats. The act breaks come almost exactly on time. Once you identify some of the tropes at play early on, you know the way most plot threads are going to play out. When it comes to that scaffolding, the movie refuses to deviate from the tracks one bit, which feels very stodgy next to Hazel (Ruby Cruz) calmly delivering the instructions on how to make a bomb in order to blow up Jeff’s car. That contrast shines a bright light on the absurdist comedy which pervades the film, and highlights how often it misses. Or else it lampshades the bizarre occurrences, explaining the joke and diminishing its impact. The movie takes a shotgun approach, so while you’re battered by constant weak jokes, there is the occasional hit that slips through. So many of the attempts at making you laugh are just shock humor, but it shines when it takes a deep breath to let the characters and audience breathe, then gives the characters a more quiet insanity.

Many of those wonderful moments are delivered in a fantastic performance from Edebiri. Josie’s the more grounded of the two girls, and the movie is told through her perspective. She also lacks the bullish nature of PJ, which helps her outlandishness land harder, so it’s a good call to give her the only full character arc in the film. It means we’re rooting for her from the beginning, since she feels most like a real person. Of course, it makes the plot beats we see coming that much more frustrating. But Edebiri really owns the character, allowing her to rise above the cliches.

The only other standout is Miles Fowler as Tim. He’s a small part, but he’s quite effective playing the not-so-clever sleuth who nonetheless achieves his goal of interrupting the club’s cohesion. He’s got this weird mix of vapidity and menace which I can’t quite put my finger on, but lands regardless.

Most of the other characters get some scant details that seem like the start of a journey, even a small one, but get dropped then abandoned. Brittany, Hazel, Sylvie (Summer Joy Campbell), all get some small asides which make you want to know more, but don’t really play into anything. Mr. G has a tiny journey, I guess, but it never really completes.

One of its biggest successes, though, is the ending. The whole time, you’re wondering how all these threads are going to tie together, what all of this is for. You know it’s going to have something to do with the football team and rivalry game, but no thoughts as to how. And the direction they go is simultaneously completely bonkers and kind of perfect. It leads to an outstanding climax, one where you wonder how we got here, like the proverbial frog in a boiling pot.

I went into this film with low expectations. I still haven’t seen Shiva Baby, but the trailer for Bottoms really didn’t seem like my thing. By that metric, this was a nice surprise. Certainly not my favorite film, but a much more pleasant watch than I thought I was in for. And I’m looking forward to continuing the summer of Ayo Edebiri when I finally get around to Theater Camp.