Atlanta Film Festival 2018

For his first feature film writer director Bo Burnham owes everything to Elsie Fisher his 14-year-old star who just completed her own eighth grade of middle school when production started. Burnham doesn’t owe A24, the distributor, not composer Anna Meredith, not cinematographer Andrew Wehde, not the editor Jennifer Lilly who has the most film experience here, all key people who can really impact a first time film director. No, he owes all of Eighth Grade to Fisher who allows Burnham to capture every ounce of her physical and mental being not so much in an exploitative way—though you might suspect that is the case since the film is reality based and highly stalking at times —but in a very anthropological way that in a positive sense schools people on what internet life is like at this age. Which is not that much different from everyone else who experienced eighth grade before Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, in terms of social anxiety. Today it’s just a more penetrating, omnipresence of social concerns.

 The Story: Kayla is in her final year of middle school. She’ll be graduating and heading to high school and we get to follow her and watch her as she navigates this delicate time in her life. Eighth Grade is a “day in the life” narrative-based fictional film about Kayla, an only child, who lives with her dad Mark, played by Josh Hamilton (The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), Manchester By The Sea (2016), Frances Ha (2012)), who does his best to stay in touch with his daughter; to allow her to do her thing while also being concerned for her wellbeing; trying to have conversations with her though she just wants to be left alone. And we see her desire to be accepted by the popular girls, while crushing on a boy, Aiden, played by Luke Prael, and in turn, her friend Gabe, played by Jake Ryan, who crushes on her.

 The Goods: What Burnham does best is write accidental maturity into these kids. That Aiden the cool, dreamy kid doesn’t even know how magnificent he is to Kayla, though he’s really scrawny and thin, especially as he makes child-like grimaces and accompanying sound effects in class. Yet he’s one of the most popular kids. And that Gabe is a nerd but his seemingly inherent gentlemanly qualities brush off of him like a dog shedding hair. A kid, a child, but one who makes Kayla dinner and shares her concerns about the future.

 Eighth Grade is not a John Hughes film, it is not a Disney film with kid actors from Disney Channel shows. It is not innocent comedic Napoleon Dynamite (2004) fun. And it’s not this year’s Lady Bird (2017) as some media outlets are saying. It sort of touches on all of the schematic pieces of these entities, such as capturing the ticks and sounds young people like to make, the natural dialogue of “likes” and “ums,” or the quirky clothing and hairstyles of kids and teachers, done here as well if not better than in Sixteen Candles (1984) or Welcome To The Doll House (1995), or in Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993). And the subculture that exists in the hallways, between lockers. But Eighth Grade is dark, the lighting is dark, the music is at times cold and isolating, whether that is all done on purpose or whether it was created this way in post-production based on inexperienced filmmaking…it’s as if we’re on another planet. Which often times we are when trying to recognize and understand kids of this age, or ourselves, when we were in this limbo between childhood and adulthood.

 And if you think of the world of Eighth Grade, whether it’s this film, or the actual moment in time—our actual eighth grade—it really is like a level of Dante’s Inferno and Burnham and the crew he works with here have nailed that in every scary, alienated, other worldly way without leaving the reality of the true situation. It’s not a documentary but it documents with accuracy this year in Kayla’s life, just as Michael Apted documented kids from seven years old and up…called the UP series, following the same people from age 7 to age 56, and is still going, and just as the Michael Apted title explains his long term biography project Eighth Grade does the same thing. It’s an anthropological title, a history term paper title, it’s a milestone, a moment, a term used for the eighth year of a child’s education. It can’t get any dryer than that. Like National Geographic, as their motto says, “to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge,” Eighth Grade, as would be fifth grade, or twelfth grade, or say the year in a college freshman’s life on campus, provides us with something more than just a Hollywood top 40 soundtrack movie with adolescent guys having sex with pies.

 In that regard, Eighth Grade is more like Fish Tank (2009), written and directed by Andrea Arnold, a fictional slice-of-life look documenting the daily events of 15-year-old Mia who lives with her single mother which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. And yet not at all like Thirteen (2003), a well-lit professional-looking film shot in a handheld style that involves thirteen-year-old girls in a pattern of self-destruction, and stars Holly Hunter, again, a single parent. To further describe where Eighth Grade fits into the narrative film structure of this genre.

 The original music in Eighth Grade, composed mostly of electronic music by Anna Meredith, adds more of a Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising (2009), Drive (2011), The Neon Demon (2016)), feel at times. There is definitely a science-fiction underscore to the film. When we consider the effects the internet and social media have on Kayla’s young mind, the way Burnham captures late night screen time with Kayla, in bed, always with her purple earbud headphones on, sort of hiding from dad, and the world, in the darkness of her room with the single light of her cell phone…it’s no different than any other cold, electronic, robotic, A.I. image in any science fiction film dealing with lonely astronauts.

 Or like in the films of Refn where the central characters are often loners where the camera follows them and stays with them all day allowing us—with electronic music—to crawl under their skin like nano bots and go along for what is usually a dramatically creepy ride.

 The music proliferates the fantasies and fears of the young person experience, more so than music from a Hughes film, but not dissimilar to Sophia Coppola who does this quite well in nearly all of her films, using musicians like electronic synth-heavy bands and artists like Squarepusher, Air, Klaus Schulze, Oneohtrix Point Never and the more accessible Avicii, or deadmau5.

 Even bigger, wide reaching films have an original electronic score most of which lends itself well to suspenseful or psychological moments, in recent films like Game Night (2018), score by Cliff Martinez, and Phantom Thread (2017), soundtrack by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood. Greenwood was nominated for an Oscar in the Original Score category for that film and recently scored Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here (2018), which, starring Joaquin Phoenix, is much more common in tonality, music wise, electronically, to contemporary films like Drive, and Tron: Legacy (2010), and curiously Burnham’s Eighth Grade. Both films in fact—You Were Never Really Here and Eighth Grade—have tracks that are siren-like in their attempt to interpret scenes where sirens might be required for both a) the characters in the film, as sort of red flags, and b) for the audience in enhancing the “alarm” of character distress.

 This kind of music is nothing new. Hans Zimmer of Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), uses nearly all synthesizers and electronics; as does Steven Jablonsky, composer of the Transformer films. That same highly affective synthetic sound logic is found in the X-Files TV show and films, Scarface (1983), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011), the Blade Runner films, Hackers (1995), big film and TV stuff. But indie films too have a pedigree of electronic music as part of their original soundtrack. John Carpenter, the sci-fi and fantasy indie film king, composes a lot of electronic music for his films, the most noticeable and recognizable being the theme from his Halloween films, but also Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), They Live (1988), Ghosts of Mars (2001), etc. And a near wordless action nail-biter like Terminator (1984) relies heavily on electronic music that drives the tension and suspense of that film like few others.

 The point of all of this is two things: a) the electronic music you hear in Eighth Grade works against the character, is a cold partner to the artificiality and falseness of social media, and creates a subtext of “alien presence” in the sense the soundtrack synthesizer is the voice of a world outside of reality, at best symbolizing the world of overbearing self-consciousness young people exist in at this age, and b) if that is so, then the upside is that Kayla’s character beats this sound around her, rises above it and conquers this monster-alien’s monolith alarm warfare in times of greatest challenges within the film.

 Even when we hear a contemporary song, like one from Selena Gomez or Katy Perry, it is not the party anthem of good times, one that appears on a soundtrack you can download on iTunes or buy at Walmart, but instead is often muffled in the film by kids conversing or by earbuds and quickly replaced by Meredith’s electronic composition which we surely come to recognize as representative of Kayla’s true psyche. And that music, it’s almost like the black alien goo from the Spider-Man comics which eventually takes over the bearer’s body and goes on to become Venom, taking over the mainstream pop music of  Eighth Grade.

 But Kayla rises above all that, and that is the film’s most successful aspect. It gives this character’s story a positive punch in the end.

 The Flaws: My problem is it’s all just a little too dark, that the film goes to the dark side of eighth grade angst and isolation more than I’d like it to. Which makes the film stand out, I recognize that, and for which it also makes the film better than most in this category. I find the music a little too invasive, but that’s the point too…that all of this social media stigmata and middle school distress is overbearing. And the music gives the film a signature that neither Kayla nor the audience can shake. Is that what reality is like? Are we affected by technology and people around us, our place in society, to such a degree it gives us a mark of disgrace, of shame, and an aura of neurosis? I don’t think so. In reality. At least not permanently. But yes, in the movie, the electronic compositions are so strong they put a UPC code-like stamp on our Kayla that leaves us very little hope for a positive future. In that regard Eighth Grade feels more like a monster movie than a young adult drama.

 Comedy is what we need a little more of here, if we wish to retain the sense of realism Burnham has done so well with here. If we could laugh at ourselves a bit more in Eighth Grade, laugh with Kayla, watch Kayla laugh a little at herself and some of her circumstances, not in a Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) way, or in a Clueless (1995), Amy Heckerling way, or in a Mean Girls (2004) way—but in a Matt Damon laughing at Robin Williams way in Good Will Hunting (1997), or in a Tom Berenger trying a stunt jump in The Big Chill (1983) way, or in a Rachel Getting Married (2008) wedding craziness relief like family toasts way…if we have these comedic personality traits in Eighth Grade, the comedy of life’s weirdest moments would seem more real than it does here in what we only see as a series of reactions that for Kayla express disappointment and embarrassment.

 That realistic lighting and those humiliating parents and that awkward bathing suit at the swim party, that the prospect of a relationship with someone we have a crush on, those “realities” aren’t real enough in the end without the ability to laugh at something, anything, which is what kids do with their friends—seeking comfort from the madness of this time in our life.  True, that doesn’t always happen. Some kids don’t get that outlet, the outlet of life-like friends, or sports, or after school programs…or that opportunity to vent while just hanging out with friends after school watching TV and laughing at body noises and funky odors. In the film Eighth Grade, we get a glimpse of that and see that Kayla does in fact have those options, yet we only really see her drop her guard, loosen up, on one or two occasions which are far outweighed by the more humiliating, self-conscious, constricting horrors in her head.  

 Working with limited budgets, cast, equipment, you’re talking a school full of kids, a community, a shopping mall, a high school where the eighth graders shadow high school students…sure, there are a lot of successful quantities here. And in that regard Burnham has made a great film. Correction, Elsie Fisher has made a great film, as laden as it is with oppressive dark matter of the universe.

 The Call: Spend the ten. Eighth Grade is shy of being a master piece but it’s a fantastic dramatic debut for Burnham who by trade is a comedian. His previous directing work is with TV and cable comedy stand-up specials with the likes of Chris Rock, Jerod Carmichael and himself even though there’s rarely any comedy in this film. The original electronic music by Anna Meredith is at times mostly highhanded and sometimes terrorizing; the film could use a few more real-life comedic moments to punchline Kayla’s most difficult moments. But Elsie Fisher offers herself up for the cameras like a pro. Meryl Streep has nothing on her. It’s more than acting though. She’s sacrificing herself for the good of the film. Burnham has a lot to be thankful for. And so do we. Gucci!

 Eighth Grade is still on the festival circuit and will receive a rating closer to release date. Running time is 1 hour and 34 minutes.