Jason Kasdan’s Bad Teacher didn’t amuse me as much as I hoped it would, for two reasons. First, Lucy Punch’s demonic fury was never unleashed. Second, Justin Timberlake’s cuteness never became ridiculous. That Cameron Diaz never made me laugh was not a disappointment, because I never expected her to. What did surprise me, though, was the intensity of the impression that she made of not acting at all. She left me convinced that if for some reason she were called up to teach seventh-graders, she would be as negligent and uninspiring as Elizabeth Halsey, the gold-digger with no gift for hiding her shovel. I’m not going to say that Ms Diaz is bad in this movie, but she really does put the bad in Bad Teacher. When she’s rude and unpleasant, she is also frightfully convincing. It is the sort of performance that raises doubts about the integrity of pretty blondes to something approaching certainty. 

Justin Timberlake, so adorable in The Social Network, is a curiosity here. As Scott Delacorte, the high-minded but sunny ingénu with a surprising taste for protected sex, he is utterly believable, but there is none of the edgy self-mockery that David Fincher elicited in the Facebook movie. Like Ms Diaz, he seems not to be acting a lot of the time. At best, he channels the clueless nice guys that Cary Grant played in movies like Bringing Up Baby, only without the improbability. I thought that the gist of the Justin Timberlake story was that he had survived his teen stardom as lead singer of ‘N Synch. You’d never guess it from Bad Teacher. While we’re on that topic, let me point out that even Jason Segel, as the gym teacher with an unlikely interest in the bad teacher, has difficulty projecting his role, but at least in his case this makes sense, as his character is not very believable; when was the last time you ran into a guy who dreamed of teaching phys ed at Harvard, settled for a Cook County high school — and likes to mock participants at poetry slams? Maybe this is what “high concept” means — you have to be high to get it. There is a lot of dope-smoking in Bad Teacher, but all it contributes is an unwanted taste of verisimilitude. 

All of this might have been saved by a really good mad scene for Ms Punch, who remains the sole reason for watching Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks. She brings to thwarted affection a demented stubbornness that is truly life-threatening. As Amy Squirrel, she starts out as a goody-goody teacher who is too full of herself to win the trust of her pupils, and it’s clear that her cheerful oppressiveness is what makes students tolerate Elizabeth’s gross derelictions in the classroom. By degrees, Amy’s determination to get what she wants — Scott Delacorte, for one; an annual teaching award that she has becomed accustomed to winning, for another — gets the better of her, and at two points she is warned not to let “what happened in 2008” happen again. Oh, how I wanted to know what happened in 2008! I wanted to see it! But the actress was never permitted to realize the kind of comic meltdown that may, we hope, eventually become her trademark.  Ms Punch does a very good job with what she’s given, gamely shoving her way through the movie’s later scenes threatening “Jail time!” with her cheeks inflamed by poison ivy (contracted from the skin of an apple poisoned by Elizabeth) and retracting her upper lip with Freddy-Krueger-like monstrosity. But at no point is the Elizabeth, or anybody else, in real danger. Personally, I was hoping that Amy would blow up the school out of spite, perhaps using spite itself as an explosive. At least she might have immolated the bureaucrat played by Thomas Lennon in the lurid photographs of his night of shame. Instead, she is carried off stage in handcuffs, demanding that her urine be tested. 

The real failing of Bad Teacher is its vernacular setting. John Adams Middle School, which the principal played by John Michael Higgins constantly refers to as “Jams,” is a generic hellhole of adolescent ennui that would be unimpressive on television. You, too, might consume inappropriate substances and pass out in front of your class if you had to teach there. The clichés — take, for example, the anodyne performance by “Period 5,” the faculty band, at a place called The Midnight Cowboy Saloon, hoo boy what a night out! — are perked up by nothing more than the occasional touch of grossness. It is difficult for a Hollywood movie to have no production values, but Bad Teacher comes close. The worst thing is how oddly appropriate this dulness is: how catatonic would a world have to be to make a guidance counselor out of Elizabeth Halsey? That’s the movie’s final joke. A lot of viewers are going to find it distinctly unfunny. I laughed, but it wasn’t at anything that Cameron Diaz said or did.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.