The Awkwardness of High School

It’s been a long time since I last watched 1999’s American Pie. Very possibly the last time I watched it was in college, only a few years after it came out. I’d seen it a couple of times by then, not just a DVD of it I picked up at some point (with a Target-exclusive bonus disc titled “Beneath the Crust”), but I’d actually seen it originally during its run in theaters. At the time I found the film hilarious, laughing along with a couple of friends to the antics of a few high school guys (who weren’t that different in age from myself at the time), all of whom wanted to get laid.

Although I don’t have the mindset of 18-year-old me, I assume I found the characters relatable, to an extent. Young, dumb kids just wanting to figure out what it takes to get women to like them and, well… everything else that comes with. The film was about sex, and the comedy around it, and then it evolved as the story progressed into the guys finding actual love and figuring out what they really wanted in life. There was a certain message there that did work, although I doubt most of the guys watching in the theaters likely got that message. Certainly, if you go back and watch it again, much of that message really is buried in the film.

To be honest, going back and watching this film after close to twenty years, I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as I used to. It’s a messy film – structurally, story wise, content wise, and more – and that holds it back a lot. There were so many places in the film where I found myself struggling with the characters, their actions, what they were doing, and how the film seemed to celebrate and glorify their creepy behavior. This is a film all about four dudes looking to score and, no matter what else goes on in the film, the end result is the guys getting (more or less) exactly what they wanted with little in the way of consequences. And, really, consequences for most of them were required.

The film focuses on four friends – Jason Biggs as awkward around girls Jim Levenstein, Chris Klein as jock bro Chris "Oz" Ostreicher, Thomas Ian Nicholas as Kevin Myers, the only one in the group with a girlfriend, and Eddie Kaye Thomas as the erudite Paul Finch – who are seniors in high school. They’re also all still virgins, a fact that’s frequently made fun of by their sorta-friend, sorta-enemy Steve Stifler (Seann William Scott). After watching another nerdy guy, Chuck "The Sherminator" Sherman (Chris Owen), seemingly get laid at one of Stifler’s parties, the four make a pact to lose their virginity in three weeks, at Stifler’s after-prom party.

Each guy then sets off on their own adventure to try and get laid. Kevin pressures his girlfriend, Vicky Lathum (Tara Reid), to give up her V-Card to him, doing what he can to ingratiate himself to her… everything except telling her that he loves her. Oz joins Jazz Choir to appear sensitive to their girls there, who he thinks are an “untapped commodity”. He just never expected to develop feelings for singer Heather (Mena Suvari). Jim has the hots for exchange student Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth), but after a failed seduction goes horribly wrong he settles for cute band geek Michelle Flaherty (Alyson Hannigan). And then there’s Finch, who decides to cultivate an air of mystery about him that, somehow, gets all the girls in school hot for him… at least until Stifler gets in the way. Can each of them find a way to get laid by the deadline, or is this all just a failed plan?

Being up front, there are sections of American Pie that I do still find funny. It really boils down to two characters: Jim’s dad (who goes unnamed here but is later named Noah in the series), played by Eugene Levy, and Steve Stifler. These two guys, for very different reasons, get all the big laughs, and you can see why each of them would go on to have bigger roles in the franchise as it wound on. Levy is great playing the awkward, but earnest, Noah, trying his best to help his son navigate love and sex, and his moments are both sweet and hilarious. Meanwhile, as much as Stifler is a jerk in the film, he’s a jerk you love to hate, and Sean William Scott has such great comedic timing and delivery that you laugh at just about everything he says or does. These are the guys I found I enjoyed whenever they showed up, and they helped make the film watchable still.

Outside of them, though, I really didn’t enjoy the film and that is, in large part, because I think three of the four leads are really shitty people. Let’s start with Kevin. He has a girlfriend that loves him but all he can think of is getting in her panties. She is deeply, seriously smitten with him but it never feels like he cares about her. Part of this might be because the two actors have absolutely no chemistry together, so it’s hard to see why they’re in this relationship. But even then, Kevin acts like a shitheel the whole time. Vicky, rightly, calls him out on the fact that all he ever seems to think about is sex, and that is pretty much his whole arc. Get Vicky to drop her panties so he can have sex. In the end, when she dumps him, it feels inevitable, and it’s the one time any of these characters feel anything like consequences.

And this doesn’t even get into the weird tangent of a story about Kevin getting a Book of Love from his brother so he can give his girlfriend an orgasm. Him doing this for her is a nice thought, so there’s a point in his favor. At the same time, though, the book is brought out like it’s some magical thing, used once… and then forgotten for the rest of the film. It’s the kind of plot device you’d expect would lead somewhere further, that it would become a major factor in this story… right up until it doesn’t. It could have been removed from the film entirely and it wouldn’t have mattered at all (although we will get back to this magical tome in some of the future movies).

Oz never comes together as a character. Klein is tasked with playing him as a puffed up windbag that thinks he’s a casanova, but the fact is that the actor just isn’t good at this character. He feels too fake, too artificial in a way that drains all the reality out of the character. Mena Suvari is great at adding chemistry into her character, Heather, and her dynamic with Klein, and when she’s on screen you almost buy their storyline. But the actor can’t play this empty, vapid windbag with any sincerity, and so the guy that’s pretending to be deep and sensitive to get a girl feels hollow throughout the movie, even when he finally gets the girl.

Jim has the worst storyline as he, quite literally, commits a sex crime. In his big scene with Nadia he decides to set up a webcam and broadcast her to his friends… except he also accidentally sends the link to everyone in school. So everyone sees Nadia naked, without her consent, and then they later watch her rub one out, then see her and Jim sort of hook up before it all ends. This results in her getting sent away by her host family, ruining her life at the school. Jim is made fun of because he prematurely ejaculates twice during the session, but there’s no legal consequences for what he’s done.

Instead it actually is the reason why Michelle will go out with him (because he’s a “sure thing”). This despite what Jim did earlier, and the fact that he clearly doesn’t like her. He acts rude and dismissive to her the whole night, but for some reason she still wants to sleep with him. So he gets what he wants from one girl, and seems proud of himself after. And then, at the end of the film, we see him having a web call with Nadia and she seems happy to see him. This is gross, on every level. Jim is supposed to be our main character and yet I really hated him here.

But, okay, I’ll concede I didn’t mind Finch’s storyline as much. He tries to cultivate that air of mystery, with the help of his friend Jessica (Natasha Lyonne), who spreads rumors about how much of a stud he is around school. The plan goes south when Stifler plays a nasty prank on him, and it ruins everything he had set up. But then, at the end of the film, just by being himself and not trying he actually seduces Stifler’s Mom (Jennifer Coolidge). Honestly, I felt this was fine as she seemed to like him for him, he didn’t lie about who he was or put on airs. It was just a real meeting between two people and even if she is twenty years older than him, at least it felt consensual. There are worse storylines in this film.

Thing is, though, all of this happens with and around the guys while the girls in the film are barely afterthoughts. Vicky just wants Kevin to say he loves her, all so she can decide if she wants to have sex. But we don’t learn much about her outside of how she affects Kevin’s storyline. Heather is much the same, acting as a jazz girl for him to fall for, but we don’t learn anything outside of that. Nadia is just a hot exchange student with an accent, and Michelle is treated like some sort of boil-infected troglodyte that Jim has to settle for, right up until she becomes a freak in bed. Giving some depth to these girls would have helped the film a lot. But then, if the girls were treated like real people we probably would hate the dudes in the film (at least, even more than we already do).

Overall I really struggled to get through this movie. The twenty-five years since this film came out, and my own changes as a person, made a film I used to enjoy into something that felt creepy and wrong. After watching it I went online to see if my take was weird and discovered that a lot of others have had a similar change of heart over the film. The bad parts of the film are harder to ignore, making this film into something darker and less “innocently fun” than it used to be. It’s a hard start for this franchise, considering all the years since it came out, and it’s already put me in a sour mood as I go through the franchise again. I really hope they all aren’t going to have aged this poorly but, well, my hopes right now aren’t at all high.