I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009)

"I Love You, Beth Cooper" arrives in 2009 as a Chris Columbus production, which is to say a film about teenagers made by a man who appears to have heard about teenagers from a distant relative. Denis Cooverman, valedictorian, uses his graduation speech to declare his love for the head cheerleader and to instruct his best friend Rich to come out. That second item is the film's quiet engine, a coming-out arc delivered first as a running gag and then, in the final act, with unexpected tenderness. The handling is clumsy and extracts laughs at Rich's expense, yet the friendship between the two boys carries a warmth the rest of the picture cannot manage. On the representation ledger this counts for something, modest and imperfect.

Beth Cooper resists the bimbo template. She is a reckless driver, a briber of gas station clerks, a capable force who is named after a KISS song. The film grants her complexity while still dressing her in the cheerleader uniform, which is the compromise this genre makes with itself. Rich Munsch, meanwhile, quotes movie titles with director and year attached, a behavioral tic the screenplay treats as comedy but which reads today as an unlabeled neurodivergent portrait. Nobody in the film names it. Nobody names much of anything.

Where the film is silent, it is thoroughly silent. Race goes unremarked. The environment does not intrude. Money exists only as an excuse to wreck a house. Body image is not a subject. History is not a subject. There is no sermon, no lesson, no lecture, just a long night of property damage and a boom box joke borrowed from a better film. The result is a picture with a few progressive instincts buried under a great deal of noise. It is not a moral failure. It is simply tired, and it lost to a seventh-place opening weekend without much complaint from anyone.

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