The regular flow of indifferent high-school comedies has been occasionally enlivened in recent years by a reworking of classics in a teenage setting, most enjoyably perhaps the transposition of Jane Austen's Emma to Beverly Hills in Clueless and of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew to Padua, Seattle in 10 Things I Hate about You.
A successful example of such exercises opened this week. Easy A is less a modern version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter than a witty look at some of the novel's themes – hypocrisy, humiliation, conformity, social cowardice, individual goodness – in a Californian high school where the book is on the curriculum. The delightful Emma Stone plays Olive, an intelligent, witty 18-year-old virgin who's pushed by her best friend into pretending to have a secret lover. The fake confession is overheard by a pious classmate, leader of a fundamentalist religious group, and in her hands gossip is transformed into scandal (which Wilde defined as gossip made tedious by morality). Very soon, after helping a tormented gay to appear as a conventional straight guy, Olive gains a reputation as an easy lay and becomes a pariah.
The movie is not only cleverly developed and sharply observant of high-school life. It also makes a clever comparison between Victor Sjöström's classic silent version of The Scarlet Letter starring Lillian Gish and the terrible Demi Moore treatment that most of Olive's class have seen in lieu of reading the book, and there is an amusing disquisition on Brat Pack films of the 1980s. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are a brilliant double act as Olive's liberal parents, whose cultivated sense of humour and falling-over-backwards empathy are part of the joke, and there's excellent work from Thomas Haden Church and Lisa Kudrow as sympathetic teachers. You'd have to see Easy A to fully appreciate Olive's line: "If there's one thing worse than chlamydia it's Florida."
