Early on in Jake Kasdan's Bad Teacher, Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) — the no-good educator from the title — reveals that she snuck into her profession because of “shorter hours, summers off, no accountability.” If that doesn't cause long lines to sprout in front of recruitment windows in educational institutions, I don't know what will. Well, this perhaps — the American school system is shown to be so hopeless that a teacher can get away with zero preparation, simply screening movies to students while swigging from a hip flask behind a desk. The film might have been called Dream Job.
The terrific Bad Santa showed us that comic gold could be mined by debasing a beloved figure, and we expect that Bad Teacher will persevere with that regrettably undernourished cinematic tradition, especially given that movies with teachers as protagonists (To Sir, with Love, or Dead Poets Society) typically strive to enshrine them as gods. It warms the cockles to see a devil let loose amidst impressionable minds.
Elizabeth's coaching methods include belting students with a basketball and threats of a quiz on the first hundred pages of a just-assigned book. She sees a pupil crying in the halls and quickly does a U-turn. She needs money for a boob job (she has roughly $45 in her bank account; she needs only $9955 more) that she thinks will land her a rich husband, and so she volunteers to oversee a fund-raising car wash.
She steps out in shorts and a knotted shirt, drenched in suds. It isn't surprising when the father of a student walks up to her, later, and says, “I'm sure you have a full plate and a rocking hot body.” In contrast, fellow-teacher Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch) is the embodiment of commitment (you could say over-commitment), the kind of person who will charge into the men's room to have a talk with the principal, never minding that this is the one time, the one place he can be alone with his thoughts.
The sly joke of the film is that Elizabeth may be the better teacher. When a terrifyingly ambitious girl — she looks like she'll grow up to be Reese Witherspoon in Election — says that she dreams of being President one day, Elizabeth coolly asks if that's her dream or her parents' and if she's considered a career as a masseuse, for instance. (The tips, after all, are great.) The scene is played as brash comedy, but underneath lies the reality that we're too young in school to know what we want.
If Bad Teacher isn't as consistently uproarious or perceptive as its sounds, it's because Kasdan is torn between making a potty-mouthed satire on the education system (and perhaps female empowerment; no just deserts await the wicked) and a potty-mouthed romantic comedy — even if he wanted his film to be both, he cannot pull it off. The two men completing the triangle are Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake, the super-rich teacher who inspires Elizabeth to get a boob job) and Russell Gettis (Jason Segel), the gym instructor who understands Elizabeth better than anyone else.
Segel's breakout part was in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and he's so sweet-natured there that his crudeness here is doubly funny — it's like watching your grandfather suddenly turn into Lenny Bruce. Segel and Diaz nail a late romantic scene so wonderfully that I wished Bad Teacher had been about them. He likes to smoke pot, is as cynical about his job as she is and almost as incompetent — he can't even climb ropes in gym. They're a match made in hell.
Bad Teacher
Genre: Comedy
Director: Jake Kasdan
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Justin Timberlake
Storyline: A bad teacher is out to get the man of her dreams.
Bottomline: Not as funny as it should have been, but not terrible either.
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