Bottoms

This heightened and surreal high school comedy won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you can get onboard with its daft and satirical tone, it’s an absolute delight.

Premise:  A series of misunderstandings lead unpopular high school best friends PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) to set up a feminist self-defence club as a front for getting closer to the subjects of their lesbian crushes, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber).  But soon the girls’ violent fight club attracts the ire of the football jocks, led by Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and Tim (Miles Fowler).

Review:

Broadly speaking, comedies normally fall into one of two categories – there are those that are set within a fictionalised-but-grounded version of reality (such as, to use a couple of classic high school comedies as an example, Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You), and then there are those that are set in a heightened reality where surreal and fantastical events are accepted without anyone really batting an eyelid – such as the classic newscaster battle royale in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.  Although I don’t want to give anything too specific away, Bottoms is definitely in the second category, featuring surreal touches like an entire town (unhealthily) obsessed with a local high school football game, and high school jocks who wear their full American football pads 24/7 as their entire identity.

It's against this heightened backdrop that Bottoms takes place, focused on a pair of self-proclaimed ‘ugly, untalented gays’, PJ and Josie.  The film is at pains to remind us that the best friends are not social outcasts because of their sexuality, but because of their awkwardness and weirdness, which makes the characters instantly relatable to anyone who’s felt like an outsider, as well as ensuring that the characters’ sexual orientation is part of their personality rather than the central subject of the movie.  Rachel Sennott (who co-wrote the film, alongside director Emma Seligman) has the showier of the two roles, with PJ being the driving force behind the duo’s scheme, and Rachel Sennott delivers her character’s spiky, sarcastic dialogue with relish.  Meanwhile, rising star Ayo Edebiri, fresh from her recent Emmy win for The Bear (as well as her incredible voice performance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem), is great as the more sympathetic and cautious Josie, and the pair share a believable chemistry as childhood friends.

“…some great portrayals of female friendships…”

While Bottoms is not especially trying to be a film with a ‘message’, it does provide some great portrayals of female friendships, both between the two leads, and with the other girls who join the ‘fight club’, including Ruby Cruz’s Hazel, a social outcast with a difficult homelife, Havana Rose Liu’s Isabel, the cheerleader dating the school quarterback, and Kaia (daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford) Gerber’s Brittany, who initially seems to have no identity of her own other than being Isabel’s best friend.  Although ‘female empowerment’ is initially used as a cynical ruse by PJ and Josie to set up the club, it eventually becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Outside of the fight club, there are also some great comedic performances from the likes of Nicholas Galitzine as the vain and dim-witted high school quarterback, Miles Fowler as his dutiful and unfailingly loyal second-in-command, and even NFL legend Marshawn Lynch appears as a hilariously disinterested history teacher who’s going through a messy divorce.

“…loose, weird & wacky…”

This is only Emma Seligman’s second movie as a director, and it couldn’t be more different in tone or style from her debut movie, Shiva Baby.  Whereas that was a grounded and tense relationship comedy that generated an anxiety-inducing sense of claustrophobia, Bottoms is loose, weird and wacky, successfully striking an engaging balance between the silly heightened comedy, the surprisingly bloody violence, and the more satirical elements.  The plot itself is less important than everything else that makes Bottoms so much fun, and although some of the story beats are fairly standard tropes for high school movies, the third act went in some unexpected directions.

This is an R-rated comedy – for both its language and its violence – so it’s clearly aiming for a different audience than, say, Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, but it nevertheless deserves its place among the best high school comedies of the last few decades.  Despite having only received a limited theatrical release, Bottoms still managed to make its budget back as well as earn critical attention and award nominations, and hopefully it’ll be destined to find an even bigger audience now it’s available on home entertainment.

“…its surreal, heightened comedic tone was a breath of fresh air…”

I had a blast with Bottoms – like with all comedies, it may not be to everyone’s taste, but its silly sense of fun is difficult to resist, and its surreal, heightened comedic tone was a breath of fresh air.  All that, and it even has a blooper reel playing over the end credits.