Mark Reviews Movies: CLASS RANK

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Capsule review by Mark Dujsik | May 10, 2018

Director Eric Stoltz seems unable to decide if Class Rank, his debut feature, is a down-to-earth comedy about quirky characters, a quirky comedy about down-to-earth characters, or a quirky comedy about quirky characters. It wants all of these options and tries them out at different times. It's worth noting that at no point, until a rush of sincerity near the end, does the movie attempt to be down-to-earth regarding its comedy and its characters.

The story follows two teens in high school. Bernard Flannigan (Skyler Gisondo) is an overachiever, and so, too, is Veronica Krauss (Olivia Holt). To her horror, Veronica is ranked second in her class. Believing that this will hurt her chances of getting into an Ivy League school, she decides to start a campaign to eliminate the class ranking system.

Bernard is active in local politics, having never missed a school board meeting since he was a kid. Veronica convinces him to run for the board. She'll be his campaign manager, and he'll get rid of class ranks.

Both of these characters are, well, a bit odd. That's the joke for a long time, with Veronica having her entire career planned out ahead of her and Bernard being very particular about the order of things. It would be easy enough to find both of them obnoxious in similar yet very different ways, but to the movie's benefit, both Gisondo and Holt make their characters' respective idiosyncrasies of secondary focus. They're not playing strange characters. They're playing likeable teenagers who just happen to have some strange characteristics.

In the same way, Benjamin August's screenplay doesn't make the lead characters the butt of the movie's jokes. It's a good-natured comedy. It simply seems to believe that the characters' most identifiable traits, a subplot about Bernard's grandfather (played by Bruce Dern) falling in love, the growing admiration and affection between the teens, and a story about politics that has nothing to say about politics will be enough.

It's not, although there is a certain charm to Stoltz's simple tableaus. He's wise enough to let the performances from the leads guide most of the humor, too. Even so, Class Rank follows such a distinct formula, is so indecisive about its tone, and feels so neutered in its political observations that its occasional pleasures are only minor.

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