Eighth Grade Review
While at the dinner table, on her phone (as always, amirite, parents?), Kayla (Elsie Fisher) keeps getting interrupted by her dad (Josh Hamilton) telling her how great he thinks she is. Kayla’s dad has a worryingly positive vibe to him throughout Eight Grade, Bo Burnham’s full-length debut as a writer and director, and this early scene is meant to establish his role as the awesome parent who just wants his kid to stop worrying about all the passing fancies that all kids tend to fixate on. And while the scene accomplishes getting that derivative message across well enough, I was too busy mentally rereading Sarah Boxer’s Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead as this hokey schmaltzfest unfolded before me to even care.
Eighth Grade obviously isn’t a cartoon or a kids movie like the ones Boxer listed in her piece. Hamilton feels like a cartoon character at times with his endless well of cheeriness, but the icy feedback he receives from Fisher creates a much more complex emotional environment than, say, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Fisher’s character is on her own micro-scale adventure, though, as she tries navigating through the final days of middle school unscathed and maybe even more popular than she started. Her relationship with her father is essentially portrayed as her wellness compass throughout. When she’s undermining it, she’s at her worst. But when she fully embraces it, things start getting better.
As Boxer points out, only 8 percent of US households are headed by single dads. And it seems as though literally all of them have had movies made about their lives at this point. Going in to see Eighth Grade, I wasn’t expecting it to be another one of those movies, but the lack of a mother’s presence in that dinner scene made it clear that I was about bear witness to the brave, perfect father taking on the world with his good-natured, vulnerable daughter.
What’s most baffling about this is Eighth Grade keeps getting praised left and right for its authenticity. What’s authentic here? Sure, in terms of getting the behavior of white, suburban 13-year-olds, Burnham did a fine enough job. All the hours he reportedly spent watching slime videos and people saying, “hey YouTube,” were totally worth it. But would it have killed him to study the behavioral patterns of a single-dad, or any dad really, for maybe 15 minutes? Because the relationship most crucial to Burnham’s story and his main character’s development is essentially a fucking fairy tale. It’s like if David Simon decided to have a god-damn CGI Unicorn play Omar on The Wire instead of Michael K. Williams.
To his credit, as a director, Burnham presented this relationship in interesting and engaging ways. The dinner scene itself is a perfect example of this. The dining room was dimly lit. There was a huge gulf of space between Fisher and Hamilton at the table. And the dining room, as well as the whole house itself (aside from Fisher’s room) was so sparsely decorated, it looked as though they had just moved in. These aspects became recurring patterns throughout the movie, and helped further establish how well, or poorly, these two were getting along with one another. To me, it felt as though this was an implied-but-never-mentioned story of mourning. And that story was being told very well. But then, at the big turning point of the movie, Hamilton delivers this saccharine monologue with four key words that derailed everything for me: “when your mother left”. Oh, fuck you, Bo.
This is the coming-of-age movie everyone’s relating to? Really? How many mothers are abandoning their children out there? Sure, there are definitely some out there, but why is that situation being presented in a movie meant to be a relatable depiction of a young teen’s day-to-day life? It’s completely bonkers to me.
The scenes portraying ‘the reality of middle school’ don’t really make up for such an odd storytelling choice. There are aspects to appreciate in some of those scenes. For instance, Fisher is certainly a natural on screen and is able to express true vulnerability in a way that can’t really be taught. But this admirable skill of hers as an actor gets run into the ground after a while. Eighth Grade often just goes from one melancholic vignette to another without much structure to it. And the underlying theme of smartphones and social media turning us all into zombies is just such an insipid point to make by now, I don’t know how people can still consider it social commentary.
The problem with this message is that it focuses on the same aspect of the internet and social media over and over again. And it has everything to do with who’s writing film and TV. For the most part, they’re typically white L.A. transplants who come from a middle/upper-middle-class background. They’re not going to write anything about the educational and professional benefits black Twitter users have gotten, and continue to get, from being part of an online community. They don’t know that world and don’t really seem interested in addressing it, either. Which is why their analysis of the internet will continue be of the shallow “wow, people sure use their phone’s a lot, huh?’ variety.
The good thing for Burnham is that seems to be more than fine with people. He can center a whole movie around the most idiotic familial structure imaginable and still be lauded for how real everything is because he said phones were bad. I can’t wait to see his next film, which’ll probably be about an astronaut bear who discovers that smoking isn’t healthy.