Director Burnham was in attendance at this showing of his film about an eighth-grade girl wracked by adolescent angst and anxieties. Burnham observed that the eighth grade is horrible, terrible, weird, sad, funny, then paused for a moment, and commented, “Just like right now.” I believe it may be the first time I’ve ever heard anyone parallel middle school — texting, tweeting, salacious gossip, bullying, public embarrassment and humiliation, sexual harassment, cowed adults, no filter, pure id at work — and Trump.
The parallels worked, and the audience howled.
That said, Eighth Grade is a painful film to endure. Maybe it’s too authentic, too close-to-the-bone, too unrelentingly in-your-face about the inarticulate battle going on inside the adolescent body and mind as they grope their way to what? Adulthood? Or just grapple their way to the ninth grade?
Burnham said that he set out to write a screenplay about the Internet, and in the process, discovered the voice of a young girl, “because on the internet, we all act like eighth graders.”
We often look at childhood and adolescence through the lens of nostalgia. But that’s not what we get here. He wanted a child looking both backward and forward, but especially forward in which everything for an 8th grader seems like life or death. Burnham is an accomplished comedian himself, cranking out YouTube videos with quick-witted dialogue and irreverent rap songs. This is his first feature film, and it does seem to reek a bit of self-disclosure, as much his story as 13-year old Kayla’s.
Elsie Fisher brilliantly plays this barely-teen as calm, confident, selfless (at least on the YouTube videos she produces), but in real life, she’s miserable, fidgety, restless, anxious, lonely and confused, barely able to speak. The story of inarticulate kids trying to express themselves is a painful, root-canal worthy, experience. Boys want to talk about Minecraft, and girls want deep conversations but can barely get out a halting series of “Cool,” “Awesome,” “You know,” “Gucci!” Let’s call it colonoscopy-worthy.
I applaud Burnham for wanting to tell this girl’s story, and Elsie Fisher (dubbed the voice of young Anges in all three Despicable Me films) is a stunning actor who has a career in front of her for sure, but this film at this time, in all its Snapchat, Instagram, selfie glory, was a grating, molar-grinding, test of endurance. I ached to see Ladybird again, that film from last year that revealed a girl not much older than Kayla, filled with much the same adolescent anger and angst, but able to articulate it. Apparently, it does get better.
Maybe it was seeing this as the third of my comedies in one day, but by the end of the day, I was out of laughs, and ready for a morphine drip.
This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2018.