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...of Drew Barrymore’s producing and starring in a film titled Never Been Kissed. She plays Josie Geller, a dowdy, maladroit newspaper-copy editor whose lively pleasures comprise needlework, pet turtles, and continually correcting friends’ grammar. Considerably more ambitious are her dreams; she wants a chance to write the kind of stories that will lift jaded daily readers from their mundane grind, while hopefully finding for herself perfect, literary-quality love. Doubly ironic then, that Josie, whose alter ego endured a well-publicized interrupted adolescence, should find both when her chief editor (the woefully cartoonish Garry Marshall) gives her a Cameron Crowe “Fast Times” assignment to infiltrate high school.
He should have checked with her guidance counselor first. She was such a teen pariah that her own younger brother, the socially diametric wild-man Rob (David Arquette), christened her “Josie Grossy;” even her senior prom date threw eggs at her. Consequently, try as she might, with dyed hair, retro-80s wardrobe and Rob’s so-uncool-it’s-cool Vega (that’s a car -- from Chevy -- by the way, not a stereo speaker or a video game, second in cheesy hip eeyewwwww-factor only to the Wayne’s World Pacer, which was made by a company that went out of business about the time Jimmy Carter -- remember him? -- stopped being President and started building houses), the sole clique at Chicago’s Southland South H.S. who appreciate her re-enrolled self are the geeky calculus club (led by another one of those She’s All That beauty-behind-eyeglasses types that everybody seems to think is a new thing but has been a Hollywood plot device since before the MGM lion was weaned, Helen Hunt lookalike Leelee Sobieski), who at least “offer a certain amount of protection” in numbers, literally and figuratively, when she’s targeted for ridicule again for her lack of grace.
This is a movie, though, so Josie’s English lit teacher finds a certain pre-wizened wistfulness about her. And when Rob, who’s had no life since graduation, shows up, she gets caught in his popularity draft and co-opted by the popular kids -- it also doesn’t hurt that she apparently starts wearing a WonderBra, which should have gotten a mention in the credits -- setting up yet another climactic prom scene (this makes, what, 10 or 15 in the last month?) so derivative it borrows bits of everything from Carrie to EDtv’s televised-life routine.
While there is something universal to all this -- who hasn’t, in both daydreams and nightmares, revisited the prep years? -- Never Been Kissed is still the most juvenile and insubstantial of the recent youthmarket events, more appropriate to the generally banal wave of the mid- to early-80s. Barrymore, whose recent performances otherwise show continued sharpening of her considerable innate dramatic talent, still has a lot to learn about comic timing and subtlety. It doesn’t help that she’s directed here by Raja Gosnell, whose only previous film credit is Home Alone 3, and handed dialogue by a first-time screenwriting duo. You have to wonder if, given her history of 12-year-old-in-12-step-programs and 12th-grade Lolita in “The Amy Fisher Story,” she was going back not only to explore some wallflower innocence she missed the first time around, but to preach about it a little. C
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