Bottoms – A Wild Coming-of-Age Comedy That Loses Its Way

2020’s Shiva Baby came out of nowhere when it premiered at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival, putting writer and director Emma Seligman and actress Rachel Sennott on the map and making them names to look out for. Their next collaborations, Bottoms, premiered 3-years later at the SXSW Film Festival to much of the same acclaim as the queer, coming-of-age, high school comedy generated plenty of laughs and kicked open many doors in terms of representation. While the film very much does all of those things, the film as a whole does not work, making for a mess of ideas and themes that don’t quite fit together. In what will easily resonate with certain audiences more so than others, the female friendship at its core leads the way beautifully in spite of their flaws but where the film falters is what it does with them and the commentary it is trying to make about toxic masculinity and gender dynamics. Though there’s a wildness and an edge to it, its ridiculousness and over-the-top nature takes away from whatever point it is ultimately trying to make.

Bottoms follows a pair of friends named PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Edebiri) who start a fight club at their high school as a means to lose their virginities to the popular cheerleaders. Against all odds, and with some creative embellishment on their part, they put a club together and as it started to gain notoriety, the more popular girls at their school started to show up. Working under the guise of teaching self-defense, the club got incredibly physical as the girls began to wail on one another. And there wasn’t much else to it than that. Both outsiders, as their fight club kept growing and getting noticed throughout their school, PJ and Josie started to get noticed themselves. Going into it with clear intentions, things unsurprisingly started to change as the camaraderie amongst their group started to have a positive impact on them and the girls they recruited, for better or worse. However, PJ and Josie were arguably not prepared to deal with those feelings as one seemed to handle it better than the other. Meanwhile, as their club was getting noticed, not everyone was on board with them and their impact on the rest of the school as the threat of being exposed became increasingly real.

As the fight club focused on self-defense, the real goal was self-improvement and once it was time to put that into practice, hijinks ensued as they set their sights on Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), the infallible, good-looking, and comically dumb alpha-male star quarterback of the high school football team. Putting him on such an extravagant pedestal is commentary in and of itself but the point the film is trying to make through the character and the contrast between he and the girls of the fight club was an overall missed opportunity. Though the feministic angle is still sort of there, it is surface level at best. In the end, the real purpose appeared to be to play its wild characters off of each other for laughs and for the most part, it is successful. Through a series of predictable ups and downs, lessons are of course learned as goes with the coming-of-age subgenre though that being said, there’s nothing new there. However, as the story further escalates into truly wild territory in ways that will inevitably score with a lot of audiences, its message becomes further distorted as a result.

While the writing generates hilarious moments and scenes, the true standout of Bottoms is Sennott and Edebiri. Their performances as PJ and Josie and stellar chemistry absolutely make it work. Each revel in their characters’ flaws and insecurities and play so well off of each other that they are a blast to watch together. Wildness aside, the film is about their journeys over the course of the film and though PJ and Josie may not always be the most likeable characters, PJ especially, their arcs are nonetheless compelling to watch. Outside of them, much of the supporting cast deliver a fair share of scene-stealing performances. The aforementioned Galitzine is one and Cruz as Hazel is another but the biggest is easily Marshawn Lynch as Mr. G, a sort of history teacher.

At the end of the day, Bottoms is a divisive comedy that has the right pieces but whether or not those pieces come together in a satisfying way is subjective which is fine. The film would have be better served by a more reigned in approach.

still courtesy of Warner Bros.

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.