Review: "Eighth Grade" Is Comically, Heartbreakingly Real

I’m not sure that my girlfriend’s eyes were dry at all during our first viewing of Eighth Grade. It’s hard to blame her, or myself, or anyone, for the emotional mess they might have found themselves in watching comedian Bo Burnham’s directorial debut. For a film that spotlights a typically unsympathetic age group and does not contain much in the way of action, it packs an endearing, heartwrenching punch.

Eighth Grade follows Kayla, played to nuanced perfection by the then-14 year old Elsie Fisher, as she navigates the last few weeks of her 8th grade year. I say “navigates” but more accurately, she goes through the motions in the hallways and classrooms of her school, but escapes as soon as is possible to the cyber world of Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, eschewing even conversation with her father (her sole present family member, we’re led to believe).

Kayla’s not the only one addicted to her devices, though the agony she expresses at unintentionally cracking her phone screen perhaps is the most pronounced example of the eighth graders’ attachments. Most every character can be seen as a presence on some social media, or behind the familiar glow of a smartphone at some point in the film.

The characters’ relationship with technology is interesting, and is among the better depictions I’ve seen from most contemporary television and film. Burnham presents the omnipresence of the Internet and smart devices as neither a necessarily good nor bad thing. It’s just…there. Eighth Grade could read as a promotion for Apple, or it could be a cautionary tale of the shortcomings and evils of uber-connectvity, but it avoids the exhaustive fate of either of those paths. The effect is that instead, the quality or value of its presence is left to the viewer to perceive. For what it’s worth, I— as a skeptic amidst one of the first true ‘Internet’ generations — found it a sad and isolating theme, commiserating with the parents and teachers whose attempts to merely converse with their children fell on distracted eyes and deaf ears.

It’s nothing if not a real depiction of today’s society, though, and that realism has been at the forefront of both the overwhelming praise and faint criticism for this movie. In the case of the latter, critics have expressed frustration that many of the characters feel like no more than composite stereotypes of middle-schoolers. Such a criticism feels like nitpicking in a case such as this film, though; sure, there are the all-too-familiar popular teen staples of the bratty popular kids, the nerds, the jock on which our protagonist has a crush, etc. etc. Who among us, though, has ever attended a middle school that was high on complexity and maturity, and was free of social classes? I rest my case.

Besides, the irony of that criticism is that what I love about the movie is that Kayla is not the stereotypical middle-school protagonist, and Eighth Grade is not the prototypical teen movie. I’ve loved my fair share of Easy A’s and Mean Girls’s and Superbad’s, but nearly every high school (or younger) movie highlights the ‘cool kid’ partiers, or the kids who are devoted to be the rebellious misfits. Here we have a movie about a girl who is definitively not among the popular kids at her middle school; and yet, she feels neither a burning desire to be, nor wish any sort of ill will among them. And it cannot be stated enough how much the ability to sympathize with Kayla is made possible by the performance from Elsie Fisher, whose every YouTube stutter, and quirk— such as her trademark “Gucci!” signoff, and her inability to look anyone presumably ‘cooler’ than her in the eye —render her someone you want to simultaneously want to protect from the World and go with into battle against the mean spirits of her peers.

Touches like the unintentional dorkiness and embarrassment by Kayla’s dad (Josh Hamilton, in one of the supporting performances of the year), and the appropriately dramatic music for the non-dramatic happenings in a middle schooler’s mind are the masterful touches of realism that pervade Burnham’s movie. Eighth Grade is so profoundly relatable that, unwittingly, it makes me dislike it and love it in equal proportions. As highly as I think of it, I’m not sure I’d have the stomach to sit through 8th grade again in real life, let alone have the insecurities and frustrations and fears of that time projected onto the grand screen for anyone to witness. Yet, the debutante director and his cast of young, pitch-perfect actresses and actors have done just that, to a devastating extent.