By Armond White

She’s the Man

Directed by Andy Fickman

Brick

Directed by Rian Johnson

Commercial filmmakers could do worse than update Shakespeare as the makers of She’s the Man have done. They could pretend to be hip by being fashionably superficial as in the horrible new hipster bloodbath Brick which disgraces the teen-movie genre that John Hughes revolutionized. Through coarse imitation of film noir clichés cynically transferred to a high school setting, Brick disgraces basic social ideas. But She’s the Man enlivens the basics of falling in love and of sexual maturity by sweetly adapting the premise of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Tween TV-star Amanda Bynes plays Shakespeare’s Viola as a high-school athlete. Disguising herself as her twin brother Sebastian, she wants to prove that girls can also play soccer. Viola puts on drag in response to a classmate’s sexist version of rhyming couplets: “It isn’t just me talking/It’s a scientific fact/Girls can’t beat boys/It’s as simple as that.” 

What isn’t so simple is the trouble that ensues when Viola/Sebastian enrolls at Illyria Preparatory School and falls in love with her roommate, Duke (Channing Tatum), a David Beckham-like varsity soccer champ. This modernized conceit has a transparent purpose to demonstrate teenage girls’ capability for Bynes’ target audience. 

She’s the Man operates at a less literal level than such ’80s drag comedies as Soul Man and Just One of the Boys, and it’s not a sophisticated comedy-of-drag manners like Clare Peploe’s dazzling 2002 film of Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love. Instead, director Andy Fickman and a trio of screenwriters simplify Shakespeare’s plot to offer an innocuous, but buoyant, moral lesson. Avoiding the gender pathology of Boys Don’t Cry, they’ve done what most purveyors of pop culture don’t think to do: borrow from the past for edification. She’s the Man’s modest and, yes, corny use of Shakespeare offers contemporary filmgoers what Max Ophuls called The Memory of Justice.

It doesn’t take great sophistication to enjoy this adolescent romantic comedy, but appreciating its value may require a higher standard for pop art than is celebrated in the Tarantiono era. 

Don’t dismiss Fickman’s sex farce for kids; rather, consider that its concentration on the basics of sexual adjustment is preferable to Hollywood’s typical diet of violence for kids. By “kids” I also mean the hipster adults who, wanting movies to provide them with the carelessness and smart-ass arrogance of adolescence, will indulge a mindless, graphic-novel knock-off such as the Sundance prize-winner Brick which snarkily transfers Dashiell Hammett-style crime fiction to a high school setting. 

She’s the Man may be hokey, but Brick is asinine. Writer/director Rian Johnson, with his fatuous Tarantinoisms, never touches reality. His cynical hero’s complaint, “I’ve got knives in my eyes” is just hard-boiled shtick, not real high school slang as John Hughes was good at, or as Amy Heckerling freakin’ invented for Clueless. Yet, Fickman’s attempt to duplicate Shakespearean custom in modern dress (such as having Viola participating in a debutante ball) stays credibly close to the conventions teenagers are born into and must learn to negotiate.

Frickman rejects the noir sexual stereotypes of Brick to burlesque androgyny with perfectly calculated innocence. Bynes is surprisingly adept at Disney Channel clowning (as Sebastian, she approximates Julia Sweeney’s It’s Pat voice) and as the estrus-provoking Duke, Channing Tatum’s casting proves radical. His resemblance to feral Stephane Rideau, the ambivalent, sexually alluring star of Andre Techine’s seminal Wild Reeds, helps connect She’s the Man to the finest film ever made about adolescent maturity. Brick jiggers the memory of camp; She’s the Man triggers the memory of art.

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