Bridesmaids hit theaters six weeks ago, igniting a flurry of recognition, however late and daft, that women are indeed funny. It also offered box-office proof that moviegoers are willing to endure and even enjoy female leads who don’t look quite as good as, say, Cameron Diaz. It was the Comediennes’ Spring. Alas, the underlying sexism of Bad Teacher, which stars Diaz in all her full-throttle leggy glory, pushes the trend into its autumn.
It’s not that the movie isn’t at least a little funnyit is, intermittently. Diaz plays Elizabeth, an Illinois seventh grade teacher who is insincere, heartless and entirely mercenaryfearless in her embrace of the awful. Sarcastic, crude one-liners slip from her lips easily; she projects a confidence of Eve Arden proportions.
Yet the driving narrative force of the movie is Elizabeth’s desire to obtain fake breasts. I get that screenwriting duo Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg wanted to make her awfulBad Santa in stilettos. But her desire to marry someone rich would have fulfilled the venal quotient without contradicting her character. After spending some time with her, I am convinced that Elizabeth likes herself just fine. A middle-aged woman who looks in the mirror the way Elizabeth does, taking a smug pleasure in the rightness of her assets, is not obsessing about add-ons. Preservation, maybe. So she can buy new breasts. That premise keeps tripping the movie up. It never meshes with Diaz’s aggressive performance as the thoroughly empowered shrew. Diaz really gives herself over to Bad Teacher: her makeup is not movie-star quality; her lipstick is a tight red smear, her mascara clumpy, her hair bleached almost saffron. Her pale eyes seem to glow like those of a Husky you can’t trust. She’s a little scary, a beautiful witch usually shrouded in black .
Diaz wants to be the Bad Santa of education. And she’s halfway there, pursuing shock value like a shark. Elizabeth has visited the bars where the Chicago Bulls hang out, and has encountered some successbut she bemoans the players’ wisdom: “They all use condoms and they take their condoms with them.” Bad Teacher revels in being distasteful. But it can’t just let a bad woman be bad; she also has to be burdened with a physical insecurity, even if it makes no sense. Can you imagine if Billy Bob Thornton’s character had become Bad Santa so he could steal to fund his penis implant?
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