Honor Society

I could be extremely lazy and say this is Election meets Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The lead character is a somewhat buttoned-up, but extremely ambitious and intelligent young lady not unlike Tracy Flick. She's also manipulative of both friends and strangers, and driven by satisfying only her selfish desires, not unlike Ferris Bueller. She even talks to the audience like Ferris. I could say that and be done. But the last twenty minutes of this movie throw everything on its head. This movie deserves more than that because of that. The lead character, Honor (get it, her name's Honor, the movie's called Honor Society ... yeah, it's not the strongest idea), is a highly driven, academically gifted girl. She has her eyes set on Harvard, and her guidance counselor has a connection there, but she finds out she's in competition with three other students to get that recommendation. So the movie is, ostensibly, about how she schemes to tank the grades of the other three through various means so she can be the front-runner. This, I will say up front, is the movie's biggest flaw; for much of the movie, easily half its running time if not an hour of it, Honor is an obnoxious, selfish, amoral, manipulative jerk. She's not just hard to like; she's hard to tolerate. And the way many of her classmates are written, which is as people so dumb one has to wonder how they don't have state-appointed minders to keep them from falling out of windows, you feel sorry for them as she becomes a soap opera villain. She plays on people's emotions, she gaslights, she plays on teenage boy hormones with obvious seduction techniques ... there's almost no bottom to which she won't sink. I found it hard to enjoy her or the movie at first, because she's just so unrepentant ... but then again, so is Ferris Bueller, and that movie is a national treasure. And he was a manipulative jerk to get OUT of school. Honor, at least, is trying to better herself. Does the end justify the means? That's up to the individual. Regardless, Angourie Rice does a fantastic job as Honor. She imbues Honor's prim ruthlessness with charisma. Whether you like her or not is a coin flip, but she is innately watchable as a teenage puppet master in a sweater vest. And then about an hour in, she starts to see that her attempts at sabotage are having the effects she wanted, but they're also having unintended positive effects for her targets. It's where the coming-of-age part of the story comes in, and where the character finally starts to grow. And then the twist comes in, and it isn't what you expect at all. The movie also doesn't end how you expect. I won't spoil either one, but it was refreshing to see the movie subvert expectations, and do so naturally. It never has to scream "I'M SUBVERTING TROPES" (looking at you, Rian Johnson). It builds a world in which the subversion of those tropes is a natural extension of choices and developments, and it is refreshing. That's what won me over in the end. Everything it did felt logical and natural. The growth and change in Honor were not only earned, but came through experiencing challenges and learning that you don't always win, that just because you're the hero of your story doesn't make you a hero to anybody else. It might be the most honest coming of age movie since The Last American Virgin (although the ending here isn't depressing like that was). It shows that sometimes, life unfolds in ways you can't account for, and that you might not even be able to fight back against ... but that it's okay and you'll carry on.