Cameron Diaz's character in Bad Teacher is not, to use one of the ugliest coined words to have entered common parlance, "relatable." She's a gold digger, she doesn't give a rat's ass about her job as a nurturer of young minds, she's a frequent and conspicuous user of marijuana and she's desperate to make a quick 10 grand to get a boob job. I don't know about you, but I have nothing in common with her (though there's always room for improvement).
In the grand scheme of Hollywood marketing, woman characters are appealing only when they're self-deprecating, when they allow themselves to be the butt of the joke. Even in a supposedly game-changing woman-centric comedy like Bridesmaids, you can't just be a crude and funny Kristen Wiig. You also have to be a little pathetic, a loser at dating with a recently failed baking business in your past. Bad Teacher is hardly a perfect picture, but in the context of every other comedy on the summer movie landscape -- from the faux empowerment of Bridesmaids to the neurotic frat-guy heteromania of The Hangover Part II -- it feels revolutionary. When Diaz's Elizabeth Halsey, an unapologetic bad apple, slinks into her seventh-grade classroom in black leggings and five-inch Loubs, her bloodshot eyes hidden behind black Ray-Bans, she's not anyone we aspire to be, or even anyone we'd want to be friends with. She frees us from the tyranny of relatability: She's a flagrant, unrepentant fictional character, perhaps the scariest thing a woman in a modern movie can be.
None of that good-girl stuff for Halsey. Our approbation means nothing to her; what she really craves is our disapproval. After being dumped by her rich fiancé, who's finally gotten a clue about her true nature, she has to return to the junior-high teaching job she thought she'd left behind for good. She also has to re-enter the dating pool, and as she laments to one of her fellow teachers, a supportive, dumpling-shaped sweetheart of a woman named Lynn (played, brilliantly, by Phyllis Smith of The Office), "You have no idea how hard it is to compete against these Barbie Doll types!" That's why she wants those breast implants, and she's single-minded in her pursuit of the perfect pair: She leafs through the pages of Us Weekly, circling the most delectable specimens with a magic marker.
The co-worker who has a crush on her, gym teacher Russell (Jason Segel) thinks she's perfectly fine the way she is, and he tells her so. But she has her sights set much higher: She's after the school's newest teacher, Justin Timberlake's sexy-nebbishy Scott Delacorte, who just happens to be rich (as schoolteachers so often are). Through it all, she also has to avoid the incessant nattering of another fellow teacher, brown-nosey Amy Squirrel (played by the always-marvelous Lucy Punch), who has Halsey's number and sets out to undermine her.
How does Amy Squirrel know that Halsey is a bad gal? She's perhaps tipped off when Halsey takes over the school car wash, showing up and lathering up in cutoff short shorts and platform shoes. The local dads turn out in droves, a veritable Tex Avery wolfpack, and the event raises so much money that it only figures Halsey would try to tuck some of it into her shirt, figuratively speaking.
Director Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, The TV Set) has hit his stride here. Bad Teacher marks the sweet spot between affability and disreputability. At one point the camera peers over Halsey's shoulder as she grades student papers. Her red-pen scrawls are howls of exasperation: "Stupid!," "Stupider!" and, the pièce de résistance, "Jesus Christ!" Forget trying to encourage her young spudlings; the best she can do is save them from being insufferable idiots.
The problem with Bad Teacher is that Kasdan doesn't always know when to stop with the crudeness. When we see Halsey at that car wash, her butt twitching cartoonishly in the air, it's enough that a cop passing by in a squad car is so distracted he sideswipes another vehicle; we don't need to see a junior-high kid's boner sproinging against his shorts, but Kasdan shows it to us anyway. Even rude humor can show a degree of subtlety and grace; that's a skill Kasdan hasn't fully mastered here.
But Kasdan is extremely clear about the movie's satirical stripes, and he and Diaz are completely in tune. I've often heard people complain about Diaz, claiming she's an empty-headed no-talent. That could be jealousy -- she's far better-looking than most of us mere mortals, although I think of her less as a raving beauty than as a great madcap presence. Everything about Diaz is an exaggeration: Her smile is so wide and sunny it could have been designed by the Mattel marketing department, circa 1972. Her legs are almost freakishly long, and they can be as graceful or as clumsy as circus-stilts, depending on what's called for in a scene. Diaz's great gift is that she's up for anything, and unlike so many actresses hovering around the age-40 mark, she radiates screwball confidence rather than desperation. In Bad Teacher, when Halsey is questioned about the fact that she's done nothing but play movies for her students (all of them clichéd classroom stuff like Stand and Deliver and Dangerous Minds), she defends herself with concise, self-righteous rigorousness: "In a lot of ways, I think that movies are the new books." The horror of the moment, and what makes it so funny, is that her brash sense of authority is so convincing.
For the most part, the movie's writers, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, have hit the groove just right. (And may I just say that Preston Sturges himself couldn't have come up with a better name for a comedy writer than "Stupnitsky"?) And the actors warm to the material's outright insolence. As anybody who's watched his guest stints on Saturday Night Live knows, Timberlake is a natural clown and a cutup, and he breezes through Bad Teacher like a naughty, bespectacled imp. (His chemistry with Diaz, his ex-girlfriend, is the teasing, cajoling kind.) Segel is more charming here than ever before, and his Russell makes a great foil for Halsey: He calls her on her baloney, but it delights him, too -- he sees right through her manipulativeness to the smarts beneath.
Bad Teacher may be too obvious in places, but it also has its share of casually observed moments and absurd little touches: The fact, for instance, that the faculty bigwig (played by John Michael Higgins) goes by the name of Principal Snur. Or the way Kasdan's camera cuts, not once but twice, to a glazed-looking kid who personifies the phrase "the lights are on but nobody's home."
And then there's Diaz's Halsey, wriggling her ass hither and thither, using her sex to get what she wants. How dare she? The greatest achievement of Bad Teacher is that in the end it grants Halsey only a stingy serving of redemption. She's more likable at the end than she was in the beginning, but she refuses to ingratiate herself, to slip into the mold of what a likable character should be. Women are perhaps more inclined than men are to worry about what others think of them, but Elizabeth Halsey can't be bothered. She gets too hungry for dinner at eight; she loves the theater, but doesn't come late. And you know what they say about those kinds of girls.