Mark Reviews Movies: EIGHTH GRADE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 19, 2018

You just want to tell Kayla (Elsie Fisher), the protagonist of Eighth Grade, that everything will be OK. All of this stuff will pass. All of those popular kids in middle school, who seemed to take up all of the oxygen and attract all of the attention in the room, will soon be in a significantly bigger environment, where they'll fade into the strange assemblage of cliques that is the high school experience. She'll find friends, to be sure. They might not last, but that's fine, because she'll make new friends after high school and after college and after taking a job and after everything else that happens in her life.

You really, really want to tell her these things, and then you realize, Kayla is a 13-year-old girl in an era that is somehow quite unique in the realm of the adolescent experience. She has grown up with the internet, along with its culture of always looking at a screen, always scanning the lives of other people, and always hoping that someone is looking at and "liking" your own life. Would she listen to anything we would have to say to her? Could we blame her for ignoring us?

In a way, Kayla's experience is unique in the way her life revolves as much around social media and networking sites as it does the day-to-day grind of going to school and doing homework. In another way, though, her experience is like every other kid who spent a good deal of time alone, who felt awkward in his or her own skin, who just wanted a few more friends, and who just wanted the guy or girl who seemed to have the sun constantly shining on him or her acknowledge your existence.

That's the coup of writer/director Bo Burnham's feature debut. It features a character whose concerns are both specifically her own and representative of her age, her gender, and her status, but at the same time, it seems likely that everybody could find something about her experience to which to relate. It might not just be those memories of the final year before high school, because we all feel like outsiders at some point. If you didn't, congratulations on being capable of lying to yourself so well.

Kayla's story is a simple one, but in that simplicity, there are worlds of hope and despair, of longing and disappointment, and of love and pain. It is the last week of Kaya's time in middle school, and she has to deal with the fact that her life hasn't turned out the way she expected in that interminable time since she started that phase of her education—that long three years ago.

Two things force her to confront this terrible realization. The first is at a class assembly, where everyone, from the students to the faculty, is bored and the class clown shouts out snarky remarks whenever the principal pauses. It should be briefly noted that Burnham has paid close attention to such little details in the creation of this school and its social environment. It genuinely feels like a living place, with its ecosystem of various personalities and groups existing as a disinterested and eager-to-be-finished collective.

We must return to Kayla, who's the person of prime importance here. At the assembly, a teacher announces the eighth grade class' superlatives—most talkative, the class clown, best eyes. Kayla is seated with a look of alternating optimism and terror—the hope of getting a good one and the fear of not being mentioned at all. Instead, she's awarded as the class' most quiet girl. This is even worse than not being mentioned at all.

The second thing that forces her to re-evaluate her life is a time capsule that every student assembled at the start of middle school. In it are the artifacts of her relative youth—a bunch of interests that seem to have gone by the wayside and childish things, like a picture of a pop star and a figurine of a cartoon character, that don't mean much to Kayla anymore. Fisher's performance is so attuned to Kayla's thinking that we can see the disappointment-tinged nostalgia as she digs through the shoebox, with the words, "To the coolest girl in the world," written out in jeweled letters. The entirety of her performance, really, is that astute and deeply communicated.

The rest of the film follows Kayla as she tries and repeatedly, sometimes disastrously fails to live up to those words. She makes online videos, where she offers advice to an infinitesimal corner of the internet. Her advice includes how to be yourself, how to be confident, and how to make friends. There's a devastating moment in which Kayla, arriving at the birthday party of one of the more popular girls in her class, walks up to and through the girl's house, as the words of her video play out. In the video, she talks about a time when she invited some "weird" girl to a party and how that girl ended up being the most popular person there. At some point, we realize that she's talking about herself and what she hopes will happen at this party, and that combination of gloom and optimism almost too much to bear.

The other characters of importance here include Kayla's single father Mark (Josh Hamilton), a boy named Aiden (Luke Prael) on whom she has a crush, the high school senior (played by Emily Robinson) whom Kayla shadows and with whom she becomes fast friends, and Gabe (Jake Ryan), the quirky cousin of the popular girl. Kayla's relationship with her father, obviously, is a constant, as she's annoyed with any kind of "interference" into her life. Mark tries, and Hamilton is very good at portraying the walk of that fine line between being an attentive parent and getting in his daughter's way.

Burnham ensures there's no such wall between Kayla and us, though. The film delves into Kayla's life and thought process, from how her looking at a pool filled with happy classmates is accompanied by almost horror-style music to her curiosity about matters of romance and sex. Aiden, of course, gets her thinking about the specifics—perhaps in more detail than she would prefer, after looking at an online tutorial about oral sex. Then there's a frightening backseat encounter with an older guy, whose pushiness is barely hidden by a game of truth-telling and dare-doling.

Burnham doesn't judge the sexual curiosity, the obsession with the internet, or anything else about this character, because he's sensible enough to know that, whether we like or not, these things are simply the way of teenagers now and always. Eighth Grade is a work of supreme empathy, and in that understanding of and compassion for Kayla, it's a film that feels resolutely both of its time and timeless.

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