The To Do List (2013)

Most would agree that the cinematic world needs another high school sex comedy like it needs a hole in the head, but Maggie Carey’s debut film The To Do List would seem to provide a welcome twist on the genre. Instead of following one dude or a group of dudes in a quest to lose their virginity, Carey makes a film about an introverted girl who decides to spend her last summer before college going down a checklist of sexual experiences. It’s not often audiences get to see the female perspective of such a story, and in most films like this the female characters either exist to be prudes, the “nice” girl the protagonist ultimately falls in love with, or objects who exist only to take their shirts off. The To Do List quite brilliantly flips this on its head, and the result is a relentlessly filthy comedy that nearly borders on being too aggressive. It’s a funny movie, though Carey is so focused on getting to the next gross-out gag that the film lacks a sense of sincerity that might have put it over the top.

The film itself may be a tad inconsistent, but the one constant is a great leading performance from Aubrey Plaza, whose work in this film seems destined to take her career to the next level. She plays Brandy Clark, who just graduated from her high school as valedictorian. That summer, she very quickly believes that she may not be sexually experienced enough for college, and she creates a notebook full of certain… activities for her to burn through before shipping off. The real object of her affection is the dunderheaded hippy Rusty (Scott “Texas Forever, Street” Porter), and she hopes that he will be the one to which she loses her virginity. The two of them work together at the local pool, which is managed by the semi-interested Willy (Bill Hader, awesome as always). All this happens while Brandy’s father (Clark Gregg) looks on disapprovingly, and her mother (Connie “Y’all” Britton) tries to support her. Other key players include Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele as Brandy’s best friends, Rachel Bilson as her sister, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Andy Samberg and Donald Glover as other potential subjects of her experiment.

It’s Plaza that really holds everything together, and that’s despite her being cast slightly against type. Normally we see her play the snarky, above-it-all type à la April Ludgate in Parks and Recreation. In The To Do List, she plays a character that’s below it all and constantly trying to catch up. She really is terrific, and she perfectly captures the curiosity, excitement and occasional disgust that would come with such a mission. Carey also deserves credit for writing the Brandy role terrifically well, and the contributions of both combine to create one of the most memorable female characters to ever come out of a sex comedy.

If only the rest of the universe was equally compelling. The To Do List never met a gross-out gag it didn’t like, and much of its 100-plus minute running time is spent throwing joke after joke at the audience with little regard for human life. Ultimately it comes out on the winning side, but not by a whole lot. A couple sequences just aren’t very funny, with the most egregious being a poop joke that expects the audience to think a high school valedictorian doesn’t recognize a turd when she sees one. As great as the characterization of Brandy is, just about every other role in this film is one-dimensional at best, and frequently Carey is willing to completely throw any development out the window in service of a gag. The filmmaking itself is also a little bit shoddy, and just about every set used here looks brazenly like a movie set and not like the real world. It doesn’t always distract from the comedic business at hand, and Carey has a couple nice directorial moments, but the film is always so focused on the gags that it can’t help but detract from everyone else. There’s also the pesky nostalgia factor to deal with, and that kind of stuff is increasingly starting to bug me. A movie can be set in any era it sees fit, but The To Do List is so preoccupied with its own ’90s setting that it can drift into semi-embarrassing territory. We get it, people had VCRs once.

These pesky flaws aside, when The To Do List is funny it can be really, really funny. While the filthiness can occasionally go into insane territory, when the film succeeds it’s usually because Carey and Plaza refuse to hold back. If this movie has a dark horse, however, it is Johnny Simmons. Essentially the male equivalent of the “nice” girl stereotype I mentioned above, Simmons is able to steal almost every scene he is in so long as Plaza isn’t around. He completely understands the kind of movie he is in, and whenever he and Plaza are on the screen together the film hits its highest highs. The resolution of their relationship feels a tad abrupt, and like everything else it culminates in a gross out gag, and then the movie ends. The To Do List could have helped itself by showing a bit more compassion for the characters and putting together a couple semi-earnest moments. Instead it settles for being a nonstop joke-a-thon, but the end result is about 60 percent hit and 40 percent miss. Add in the refreshing female-centric focus, and the film becomes more than worthwhile.

Grade: B