I Love You, Beth Cooper

In I Love You, Beth Cooper, nerdy valedictorian Dennis Cooverman (Paul Rust) stands before his graduating class and breaks away from the usual "look back/look forward" tradition of the event and decides to break away a little bit -- and profess his love for Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere). If Beth and Dennis were dating, it'd be an over-the-top sentimental gesture; the fact of the matter is, though, that Dennis and Beth have never spoken. Dennis has, through the miracle of alphabetical seating, gazed on Beth's hair for years and built his image of her into an undying feeling -- or, as he regrettably phrases it in his valedictory address, "I've loved you from behind for years. ..."

And that joke is I Love You, Beth Cooper, in a nutshell; a little eager to shock, a little clumsy, a little bit too eager to make the joke. Directed by Chris Columbus (who gave us such '80s teen-comedies as Adventures in Babysitting and The Goonies), I Love You, Beth Cooper is based on a novel by Larry Doyle, who's written for programs from The Simpsons to Beavis and Butt-Head; the novel is a swift, if shallow read, so clearly attempting to invert and re-invent teen movie moments that it begins each chapter with a quote from the classics of the canon from Rushmore to Risky Business. When his parents tell him to have fun in his last summer before college, Dennis offers that "This whole teenage, coming-of-age thing, it's a relatively new construct; it was invented in the '50s. ..." Well, sure, but "that whole teenage, coming-of-age thing" was re-invented in the '80s by the kinds of movies I Love You, Beth Cooper wants, and fails, to imitate; what plays as tribute on the page feels like rip-off on the screen.

But it would be one thing if I Love You, Beth Cooper simply chose to walk in the footsteps of the giants that came before it; the bigger problem is that it stumbles, badly, from the get-go. Doyle adapts his own novel, and what was thin on the page becomes even moreso on screen. Why, for but one example, is it that we're supposed to even care if Dennis finds happiness or something like it? Many films confuse protagonist with hero, but just because a character's in the lead role often isn't enough reason for us to care about them; nerdy, nasal and not-that-likable, Rust's Dennis gets dragged from scene to scene without ever really giving us a reason to go along for the ride.

And if anything, Panettiere has it worse than Rust; Beth's a hastily-patched together Frankestein's hottie, with a slamming body and a tragic past. She even gives Dennis a pass for the film's opening declaration: "You embarrassed me, but it was so sweet, I'll let you live." Which symbolizes another problem with I Love You, Beth Cooper, in that it never revs up enough to work as purely frantic farce or slows down enough to make us feel its characters are real. As Beth takes Dennis from peril to party, danger to downtime, she has to be a cartoon object of desire with a juicy outside and a fully-formed character with an earnest heart, plus convince us that she's kinda sorta falling for Dennis's charms. Panettiere can't pull this off working with Doyle's script; I'm not sure Meryl Streep or Katharine Hepburn could. Dennis claims "I Love You, Beth Cooper," but what kills the film is the fact that he -- and we -- don't even know her.

There's one scene in I Love You, Beth Cooper that I laughed at -- where Dennis's even-more-socially-awkward sidekick Rick (Jack Carpenter), who has spent the majority of the film quoting great movies, protesting he's not gay and making us want to strangle him -- flashes back to the childhood trauma that's made him work to be a master of High School's cruelest form of boy-to-boy combat. That's one moment in a very long film, although grown-ups who stumble, mistakenly, into I Love You, Beth Cooper will also possibly laugh at the sight of Alan Ruck -- Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- playing Dennis's dad, if only because their chuckles will hide the encroaching sense of their own mortality that sight creates. Doyle and Columbus could have either made their film a full-on farce, frenzied and frantic, or slowed it down and made it a real look at affection and moving on in that summer after high school ends; flip-flopping between those two is just one of the reasons that I Love You, Beth Cooper's graduation day comedy flunks.

Comments

[Fiirvoen (Jason)]

Alan Ruck was Cameron!? Holy crap, he IS getting old...

When Cameron was in Egypt's land...
Let my Cameron go....

[Vital1]

i'll see anything with hayden bennett in it!.

[Livia]

I wanted to see this film with my mother, is this a good movie? When is it going to be available at any Redbox location?