Back to School

Even if you're Drew Barrymore, reliving high school is cause for panic.

She Just Wants Your Kiss: Drew Barrymore goes back to high school

by Sam Adams

Never Been Kissed

Directed by Raja Gosnell
A 20th-Century Fox release
Opening Friday, April 9 at area theaters

It takes more than graduation to get out of high school. Long after the sheepskins have been handed out, the world still seems to break down into jocks and dorks, beautiful people and everyone else. More than anything any teacher can tell you, what you learn in high school is that you have a place, a stratum where you belong. Of course the criteria seemed devastatingly unfair: How could looks/style/confidence count for so much when brains and uniqueness were so much more obviously important? The rules seemed impossible to grasp, an arcane code that only adulthood would unlock.

As grown-ups, we push such memories down, our adolescent shortcomings concealed so as not to interfere with the completely different people we like to think we've become. But it's still easy to pick the jocks out of a crowd, or the kids who used to smoke too much pot and still ace all the tests. Some people do change, of course: Yesterday's loner is today's novelist, and the beautiful people end up as management consultants or middle-management drones, never quite sure when their gift for fitting in became a hindrance rather than a help. But others never get out of high school. From the ex-quarterback who thinks he's still captain of the team, to the awkward, gawky girl who still thinks she's not pretty, not smart, not cool enough, they're trapped, still playing a grown-up life by high school rules. Such a one is Josie Geller, the heroine of Never Been Kissed, who gets a second chance at high school and finds that she's never quite outgrown the fear that the cool kids are out there, waiting to take her life away.

Josie (Drew Barrymore), as the opening narration helpfully informs us, is the youngest copy editor in the history of the Chicago Sun-Times, but she's too meek to convince her boss (John C. Reilly) to let her try her hand at reporting. That begins to change, though, when the paper's dictatorial editor in chief (extravagantly played by Garry Marshall) shows up and decides out of the blue that Josie Geller, copy editor, is now the paper's newest undercover reporter. Her assignment: to enroll as a high school senior, and find out exactly what the kids of today are up to. Going back to high school isn't most people's idea of a good time, but for Josie, it's as if she never left. She enters South Glen South as a 25-year-old, but it isn't long before she's behaving the same way she did when she was 17, cringing at every mistake, trying to fit in, exposing the child that's been inside her all along.

On the surface, Never Been Kissed isn't much more than an agreeably glossy teen comedy, certainly better than market-driven gunk like She's All That, but hardly up to the sharp-eyed level of a Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Clueless. Director Raja Gosnell's only previous credit is Home Alone 3, and the first-time script by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein keeps losing track of characters and has a tacked-on ending that nearly ruins the whole deal. But what makes Never Been Kissed so delightfully funny, and so unexpectedly resonant, is the way it plays back high school with an adult's wisdom and a teenager's involvement, with the knowledge that such things don't matter any more, and the feeling that maybe they still do.

The first feature to come out of the partnership between Fox 2000 and Drew Barrymore's Flower Films, Never Been Kissed marks the debut of Drew Barrymore, auteur. It's hardly a vanity project, though; in fact, it's hard to remember the last time a young female star was allowed to look this bad. From the "inconspicuous" white jeans and feather boa Josie wears on her first day undercover to the ratty hair and speckled face of her teenage incarnation, Barrymore never shies away from Josie's awkwardness, which only make her portrayal that much more winning. There's a surprising tenderness to her portrayal of this grown-up misfit, not exactly what you'd expect from a woman who'd already been in and out of rehab before she hit high school.

As Josie, Barrymore radiates a kind of goofy desperation, her anxious teenage act mixed with a tendency for putting her foot in her mouth and running into stationary objects. Immediately ridiculed by the school's power clique, she falls in with Aldys (the preternaturally calm Leelee Sobieski), who invites her to join the school's math team, The Denominators (complete with custom sweatshirts). But her editor none too gently reminds her that the school geeks aren't where the story is, and Josie's back where she was when she was 17, trying to fit in with the cool kids. Watching her hideously botched attempts on a hidden video camera, her editor can only shake his head in awe: "It's like the all-humiliation network."

Her resources exhausted, Josie is saved only by the sudden arrival of her brother Rob (David Arquette), a former baseball jock. He's had nothing better to do since he graduated five years ago, so he joins Josie in her charade. For him, going back to school is the opportunity of a lifetime, and he's quick to offer Josie a way into the power clique. "All you need is one person who thinks you're cool," he tells her. "It's a closely guarded secret."

The situation is further complicated by a pair of romantic interests. The title isn't totally accurate—Josie's been kissed, but she's never really been kissed. But wouldn't you know it, when the opportunities come, she can't take advantage of either one. Guy Perkin (Jeremy Jordan) is South Glen's Most Desirable, and the spitting image of the boy who brutally humiliated Josie on her own prom night. Josie also has a more legally sanctioned crush on Sam Coulson (Michael Vartan), her English teacher, but she can't pursue it without blowing her cover, and besides, guys like that never go for her anyway. When, in a wistfully ironic moment, he tells her, "When you're my age, the guys will be lining up for you," she can only smile knowingly and say, "You have to say that, because you're my teacher."

There's something a little disturbing about the way Josie's all nerve endings and neuroses. Like Ally McBeal, the true star of the all-humiliation network, Josie seems like an endless bundle of past mistakes she'll never live down. But unlike Ally, who once said her problems were all she had, Josie finds the strength to redefine her terms. When Guy asks her to the prom, Josie finally has all she ever wanted, but she realizes life with the beautiful people isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that she's been living her whole life as if there were nothing more important than what table you sat at at lunch. "Find out who you are," she tells a prom night crowd, "and try not to be afraid of it." Not a bad lesson for anyone still in high school—teenage or otherwise.