THE AISLE SEAT - "AMERICAN PIE"
by Mike McGranaghan
The old adage "what goes around comes around" has certainly proven true in Hollywood recently. Ten or fifteen years ago, the nation's movie diet consisted of horror films in which mad slashers attacked groups of teenagers and comedies in which groups of horny adolescent boys tried to get laid. Those kinds of pictures disappeared for a while. Scream (and its sequel) brought back the slasher genre, and now American Pie brings back the horny teen boy genre. The difference is that, like Scream, American Pie invests its story with a slightly different sensibility. Gone is the objectification of women. Instead, this is a movie in which the girls are smarter than the boys.
Jason Biggs stars as Jim, a high school loser obsessed with sex. In the opening scene, his parents catch him masturbating to a scrambled cable porn channel. His buddies are equally sex-minded. There's Kevin, who wants to sleep with his girlfriend but can't bring himself to say "I love you" to her; Oz, who thinks he can attract women by exchanging his superjock image for one of a "sensitive" guy; and Finch, a goofball who starts flattering rumors about himself in an effort to make girls forget about his geekiness. The foursome make a pact that they will each experience sex before prom.
The young women they encounter are varied. One (Alyson Hannigan of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") is a "band dork" with a surprising personality quirk. Another is an exchange student who fulfills every adolescent male fantasy about female exchange students (i.e. she is easy). One of the best characters is Jessica (Natasha Lyonne), who sympathizes with the boys' horniness while never being the recipient of it. She has many of the movie's best lines because she sarcastically comments on the infatuations of the other characters. I also liked a kid nicknamed "The Sherminator." He's not a very attractive individual, so when he appears to "get lucky" with a girl, it drives the others insane.
American Pie was notorious long before its release because of the gross-out humor it contains. The advertisements have all trumpeted the most infamous scene in which Jim conducts some rude business with an apple pie his mother has baked. There is also a scene in which he conspires to transmit video of the exchange student stripping over the internet.
Although raucous in tone, American Pie somehow never seriously offends (it walks right up to that line, but it never quite crosses over it). It's a fact that teenage boys do obsess about sex a lot. The picture is smart enough to depict the way they trade misinformation, or ideas, or fantasies. Most of what adolescent boys learn about sex comes from other boys. If there's less maturity among them than there is among the girls, this is probably why. In many ways, the film itself is critical of its main characters' juvenile antics because we all know these things won't work. (In both criticizing their actions and playing them for belly laughs, the movie has its cake - or in this case, its pie - and eats it, too.)
More importantly is that, like I said, the girls are a lot smarter. They are not content to be sex objects, and they refute every effort to make them such. Films like Porky's never viewed the women as anything more than bodies; they were there to strip and little else. American Pie uses the maturity of its female characters to comment on the piggish behavior of the guys. If Jim and his crew can't get laid, it's because they don't treat the opposite sex with enough respect.
I laughed a lot at American Pie, sometimes quite hard. Although enjoyable, this is obviously an amateurish film - not in its humor, but in its screenplay, which is as disjointed and abrupt as it is funny. So many things happen arbitrarily that it occasionally feels like the script has been pasted together. The comic moments save it, though. Among other things, I got a real kick out of the supporting performance from Eugene Levy, as Jim's father. He always seems to catch his son in the act of something perverse, and Levy does some priceless double-takes.
Perhaps most interesting of all is that American Pie doesn't cop out at the end. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, there is sex at the end of the picture. If this story has a point, it's that teenagers have sex for different reasons. Some do it out of love, others do it out of lust; the consequences depend upon each individual's reasons for doing it. By the time the end credits roll, some of the characters have had pleasant experiences and some have...not. The point is well-intentioned - and even refreshing - for a teen sex comedy, but it's the no-holds-barred rowdiness of American Pie that makes it worth seeing.
(
out of four)
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