6/10
For those of you unfamiliar with Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the main character is a woman accused of adultery and forced to wear the letter 'A' in red, sewn to her dress, as a mark of shame. This extremely funny and sharp-witted film is an appealing spin on that moralistic novel.
Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is at high school, and, according to her own account, ignored by nearly everybody apart from her abrasive best friend Rhiannon. Having refused to go camping for the weekend with Rhi and her parents, Olive feels obliged to invent a story of having had a weekend of steamy sex with an unnamed guy, which thrills her friend no end. Unfortunately, the Head God-botherer in the school overhears the conversation and starts spreading the word that Olive is a slut. The next thing she knows is that her gay friend Brandon asks her to pretend to have sex with him so he can shake off the homophobic bullying that makes his life miserable. One thing leads to another, and she soon becomes available as a school alibi for any overweight nerd or misfit who wants to improve their sexual credibility. So she decides to go the whole hog, and takes on the role of the scarlet whore of the high school, with consequences that become increasingly complex.
There are many good things about the film, but best of all, it is actually funny. Yes, laugh out loud funny. It's also witty. barbed and actively anti-Christian (of the narrow-minded variety). My favourite scenes are the one that involve her and Brandon pretending to have orgasmic sex behind closed doors, but overheard by a large audience; and the ones involving her parents, Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, who achieve an almost cosmic level of relaxed and affectionate cool under all circumstances. They remind me of Juno's parents, and this film has some of that film's qualities. For most of the running time, it keeps its teeth bared, with hypocrisy and ignorance as prime targets, though, perhaps inevitably, it slips into a neat and tidy and implausibly happy ending. Some have compared it to Clueless and Mean Girls, but I think it's better than that.
