In Linda Holmes’s review of Plan B (2021), she ticks off some of my favorite girl in high school movies (Edge of Seventeen, Booksmart, Blockers)–she doesn’t mentions some of my other favorites like Thoroughbreds, Flower, Assassination Nation (???), or Girl Asleep, which is fine, because the point of being able to make pop culture references is that those references have to be popular and what would she accomplish by comparing this movie to a bunch of niche indie projects from five years ago. It’s about a month since I saw this movie with Wife and so the sheen of this movie’s memory has tarnished a little with time. Wife and I had a lot of fun triangulating where this movie fits in the constellation of teen party movies it claims as sister films after we saw it. Here’s a little of that discussion.
Probably the closest movie to this one in spirit is Lily Tomlin and Julie Garner’s Grandma (2015) in which an odd couple duo roadtrip to seek abortion access:
This is really more of a Nasty Grandpa situation in which the majority of your pleasure in watching this movie is going to be Lily Tomlin’s foul mouth and no-nonsense demeanor in the same vein as basically any Frances McDormand movie. The fun thing about Grandma is the way that it splits the audience by hiding a series of old flame stories in it. The sexualization of older folks is fun and fresh and creates a nice story parallel to the teen love story. Actually, Tomlin’s flames are all the meaningful in their contrast to her granddaughter’s lack of romance–what Anne Carson calls the “ricochet” of desire. Shoutout for a moment to Tracy Lett’s The Lovers (2017), which contains within it some of the traces of Grandma, as well, and includes the inimitable Tracy Letts.
Plan B, as Wife so aptly mentions, surprises with how early the Party Scene occurs in the teen movie. Instead of being the climax of the movie, as it is in so many others (think Superbad, think the afterparty in Blockers, think Mean Girls, think Pretty in Pink or Sixteen Candles or any of those 80s high school movies). It maintains The Search plot that is usually a quest, foiled or fulfilled, for booze, but replaces the goal with contraceptive access. The effortless representation from a diverse cast has kinship in Netflix’s Moxie. The two friends’ effortless boosterism of one another’s self confidence and easy embrace of their sexuality is reminiscent of Olivia Wilde’s direction in Booksmart. It doesn’t quite live in the raunch of a film like Flower, where the hypersexual duels with both the romantic and the grittiness of reality, nor does it dabble in sexual empowerment as in Blockers, so much as it’s about repression and the awkwardness of sex and sexy things. If there’s a subtle ick factor in the film, and this is maybe too fine of a point, but the musician that one of the main characters is trying to hook up with is clearly an uncomfortable number of years older than her high school counterpart and it’s only made more obvious through the company the musician keeps. It’s cast as an Adventures in Youth plot point, but it was notable for Wife. Some spoilers in conclusion:
Plan B does some work queering and de-centering the plots of cis het white girls in movies and those contributions make for great viewing. The chemistry between our leading actors is electric and their dynamics are compelling fare. Required viewing for lovers of the genre.
