"Bottoms" shows us what a true high school comedy can look like when you still dominate with comedic insecurity.
Our main duo, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) find themselves at the bottom of the pecking order in their high school. In an effort to lose their virginities to the two most popular girls in their school, they start a self-defense club. The club takes off, and many of the students begin to realize that it is more of a fight club. PJ and Josie do not know how to teach self-defense, leading the members of the club to beat each other up.
To see an extremely heightened cartoonish version of high school in an American film is rare in 2023. It was left by the wayside in the mid-2000s after "Superbad" and "Mean Girls," which "American Pie" and "Not Another Teen Movie" tried (and sometimes succeeded) to do a few years prior. Then there was a bubbling of a resurgence with more toned-down teen comedies of the 2010s, usually trying to make something closer to reality like "Easy A" and "Book Smart." But these teen comedies were the exceptions, as most Teen/YA American films got a lot more serious, trying to deal with the issues "with respect."
So, what has the raunchy teen comedy subgenre become in 2023? Many of the stereotypes common in teen and sex comedies of old cannot be used in the modern day because of how dated they are.
Jokes about being in high school or dealing with youthful issues feel hacky in a time post-Vine and Twitter. Social media and the internet have replaced the movie theater where people go to laugh.
But the always-dated Hollywood film industry does not understand the internet has taken full comedy away from the movie theater. I suspect this stealing of comedy is because laughing at or with people who are more relevant and unedited is much easier to get behind. The "stagy-ness" of Hollywood filmmaking makes comedy a lot harder when you have an audience who wants something relatable.
And in 2023, if you are a 90-minute comedy aimed at people from 15-50, you have to really stand out to make a profit. As the theatrical comedymakes less and less money every year,"Bottoms" had an uphill climb. It may not haveexploded at the box office, but I think this film mainly climbs the said hill.
"Bottoms" found a way to succeed by using its budget to make a high school story we could not do through our phones. With time, this will be remembered as a teen comedy that truly cared about making you laugh and squirm and a shock comedy that could only have been made in 2023.
For co-writer-director Emma Seligman ("Shiva Baby"), stepping into this world is surprising and adds a lot to the appeal and marketing of the film. Her love for characters that bottle things up and comically explode can be seen in her great debut, "Shiva Baby." The movie could only work with its mean-spirited edge because of her youth. Seligman, being only 28 years old, can remember and feel what you think is funny in your early 20s rather than the specifics of what high school is like.
What is less to my taste is the co-writer and star Rachel Sennot's "keyword" style of comedy. It is evident many of the jokes in the film are written by Sennot, referencing something shocking and relatable to 20-year-olds without any solid punchline or reversal. This is bewildering because most of the character-based humor aimed at young adults works in a playful, manic way. So, I can only imagine Sennot improvised a lot of her lines. Fortunately, the PJ material that Sennot improvised is kept to a minimum. When she can get outside her head, or when Seligman writes for her character, the scenes with her are strong.
The consistently great parts of "Bottoms" are Josie and Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch), with their charm and their communication through body movement.
Lynch's character runs with the heightened dog-eat-dog world that the school is, from football players who never take off their uniforms and sleep with other students' moms to teachers who look at p*rn in class and lecture about how feminism should be banned. Every idea for what would be funny is taken to the extreme, and it delivers even the school is more like a fast track to get the characters to the gym or Mr. G's classroom. It feels in the same vein as sketch comedy (the film's ongoing joke with Josie and the janitor especially). It is focused on the humor and the characters' interactions above all else.
This is played up–even by this film's standards– by Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), the egotistical hypersexual football player who essentially runs the entire school but also hates and is afraid of most people, like an infant given the keys to the kingdom.
That tone mentioned earlier is the standout aspect of the film. The characters, aside from Josie and Hazel, are frantically giddy about everything they do. It is infectious and adds to all the best parts of Josie, as she is the only one who does not operate on that level while still being enjoyable.
The side characters are uneven or boring. Both love interests, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Jordan Gerber), are flat personalities, and any attempt at comedy from Kaia Jordan Gerber completely falls on its face because of how wooden she is. She has multiple great jokes that she butchers because she does not emphasize the joke with any personality.
With the stylistic throwback of the raunchy teen comedy, you could easily say that this is paying homage to the boring love interests of those movies. But it is hard to tell, especially with the two love interests trying to pull off jokes, which is not customary in the archetype.
This issue of playing too close to homage rears its head at the end of the second act, and it starts playing out exactly how these movies always go. The buddy comedy split-up trope where the two main characters get mad at each other for some time shorter than it took to read this sentence. Josie realizes something about PJ that is painfully apparent from the jump and gets mad for half of a scene. It is a true low point for the film, only for it to forget about the friend break up so that a large brawl can take place as the finale. The brawl is great fun, but the buildup feels like it was done out of what was expected rather than for comedy.
While I wish for a better relationship between our lead duo and Emma Seligman taking more confident comedic swings, the stories' awkward hatred for itself more than for others makes the cartoonish emotions all the funnier. Even looking at the film is a treat for the bombastic costume design alone. "Bottoms" is an R-rated comedy that feels like it earns its stripes without being defined by how shocking it can be. Maybe this means we will get a small resurgence in the raunchy teen comedy and, hopefully, many more Seligman films.
Rating: 7/10
