I AIN'T SAYIN' SHE'S A GOLD DIGGER: a review of "Bad Teacher"

“BAD TEACHER”
Screenplay Written by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky
Directed by Jake Kasdan
** (two stars)

In my recent review of Director Seth Gordon’s “Horrible Bosses,” I remarked that while I enjoyed the film overall, it was a slow going experience as the first third or so left me extremely underwhelmed. I suppose that with “Bad Teacher,” the latest comedy from Director Jake Kasdan, I had the complete opposite reaction as the first third of the film left me howling with consist laughter and then, the wheels began to spin tiredly, the jokes fell flatter and by the film’s conclusion, the entire escapade had completely run out of comedic steam. Such a shame as this film, like “Horrible Bosses,” had such terrific potential to be a lewd, crude, nasty and yet outrageously inventive R rated comedy instead of the lewd, crude, nasty yet pedestrian, middle of the road, and completely non-threatening R rated comedy it turned out to be.

Cameron Diaz stars as Elizabeth Halsey, a surly, unmotivated and downright mean seventh grade teacher at John Adams Middle School (affectionately known as “JAMS”) who, at the film’s start, is happily exiting the world of teaching to become the wife of her uber-wealthy boyfriend. Life takes a sharp turn as the boyfriend ditched Elizabeth due to her unloving, greedy demeanor which forced her to return to JAMS as a seventh grade teacher who now arrives to school perpetually hung over, or stoned or both and “teaches” the class solely through feature films like “Stand and Deliver,” “Lean On Me” and “Dangerous Minds.”

Endlessly conspiring to exit her personal hell via catching another unsuspecting wealthy man, Elizabeth decided that what she needs in order to compete with other women for her marital golden goose is…a $10,000 breast implant procedure. Yet, without a personal sugar daddy to assist with the funds, Elizabeth takes it upon herself to obtain money by any means necessary. This includes, but is not limited to, stealing the school’s recyclable materials for cash, pocketing parents’ tutoring payments without ever intending to tutor a soul, embezzling a portion of the school’s Car Wash event, in which Elizabeth scores major funds due to her scantily clad physique which sexually massages every car in the lot to even stealing the state test answers to ensure her class will receive the state’s highest test scores, thus affording her with a $5700 bonus payday.

Soon, it seems as if Elizabeth’s proverbial ship has arrived at John Adams Middle School in the form of the new, and very wealthy, Substitute Teacher Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake). Unfortunately, Scott nurses a crush upon Elizabeth’s teaching rival, the chirpy Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), who is determined to expose Elizabeth for the fraud she is.

Certainly, all of this is well and good for a ribald R rated comedy and I am telling you, dear readers, Kasdan’s “Bad Teacher” had me from the first frame with it’s opening credit montage of teachers set to Rockpile’s classic power pop track “Teacher, Teacher.” The pace was appropriately rapid, all of the characters were introduced and set up with great and affectionate humor and the well timed and cheerfully vulgar jokes, at which I laughed frequently and loudly, were hurled at the screen in a sunshine blast that recalled Kasdan’s wonderful teen comedy “Orange County” (2002).

All was going so very well for about the first third of the film or so and then, the entire proceedings began to travel south once we were subjected to an unfortunate and needless sonic boom of a flatulence joke that simply sucked the air out of the comedic room. For me, it was difficult enough for the film to recover after that misstep but then, the wheels of the plot began to grind its wheels, the characters never extended themselves past their introductions and soon, I realized that “Bad Teacher” was not simply a series of jokes in search of a movie, it was entirely a one joke movie: she’s a teacher and she’s bad. That’s it. There’s nothing else. And the film beat that one joke deeply into the ground.

Everything happens in the ways you would expect to happen, including Elizabeth’s (slight) softening as the film progresses and frankly, that sort of thing just makes my heart fall into disappointment. While I understand that Jake Kasdan is a more populist filmmaker who certainly wants to have his films succeed financially (which this film did in spades when it was released this summer), he has also been so devilishly smart enough to understand characters, their motivations and even how to develop those characters past their archetypes. Kasdan has shown this impressive skill over and again through with debut feature “Zero Effect” (1998), the aforementioned “Orange County” and mostly through his frequently work with Judd Apatow on both of his “Freaks And Geeks” and “Undeclared” series and the excellent music biopic satire “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” (2007). Yet for “Bad Teacher,” none of those skills were on display to the level at which Kasdan has achieved in the past.

Justin Timberlake, Jason Segal, who portrays a sweetly sardonic gym teacher who is attracted to Elizabeth, and the wonderful John Michael Higgins, who portrays the school’s Principal are all wasted in three roles that are criminally underwritten. Phyllis Smith (from NBC’s version of “The Office”) is also under-utilized in her role as the indecisive and mousy teacher who nervously befriends Elizabeth. While the raven haired Lucy Punch does indeed make an impression as Amy Squirrel, ever her sheer comic energy is undone and hamstrung by the predictable screenplay which, of course, has her character grow increasingly unhinged as Elizabeth escapes one consequence after another.

And yet, I feel that the film has an even larger problem in Cameron Diaz.

Diaz is an actress I have admired for a very long time and while I have not enjoyed every film in which she has appeared or every performance she has given, I applaud her for not always taking the easy way out when it comes to choosing projects and filmmakers to collaborate with. Yet, this time, she struck me as being a bit lazy. Certainly, she is raunchy enough to take on this role with a sense of relish but frankly, there’s really not much for her to do. While she sets up her character nicely when she states that she thought that she entered the career of teaching for the right reasons, “summers off and no accountability,” there’s really nowhere else for this character to go. Yes, this is definitely a screenplay problem and I understand that Diaz did not write this material herself but did she really have to strut around the screen clearly showing that this project exists as not much more than a “paycheck movie” for her? Diaz plays this character yet she never becomes this character. I even had problems remembering what her character’s name even was throughout the film. That speaks to how little of an impression she made with “Bad Teacher.”

There is no sense of danger to the character of Elizabeth Halsey and there fore, no sense of danger or vicious edge to the film as a whole. It’s all so trite and safe and like “Horrible Bosses,” the film just did not understand that simply saying nasty words and doing nasty things is not inherently funny. Without a real strong story and context, all of the vulgarity falls flat in that vanilla fashion that mars so many would be “edgy” R rated comedies these days. It seems to me that the filmmakers perhaps needed to study something like Writer/Director Terry Zwigoff’s “Bad Santa” (2003). That film, if you remember, starred Billy Bob Thornton in a terrific performance as the maliciously misanthropic mall Santa Claus and Zwigoff created a rich and terribly hysterical nasty world filled with skuzzy characters that were complete and elevated the proceedings past the catchiness of that film’s title.

Whether Kasdan and his cast and crew enjoyed that film or not, none of that film’s dark comedic magic occurred with “Bad Teacher.” It’s not an awful film by any means, but again, it’s one that just didn’t try hard enough to be the risky, R rated game changer it could have been.

And you know, this may be a more than silly observation but I cannot help to mention that it did indeed cross my mind. Do we really need a representation of a teacher that will only fuel the profound misconceptions of those 1 per centers out there? I think not. But…if you are going to do it, then go for it and create an image and film experience that will keep all of those idiots up at night and the rest of us painfully holding our sides in collective laughter.