American Pie Movie Trailer. Which scene is the grossest? The beer scene? The pie scene? The toilet scene? All over the country during the next few weeks, teen-agers able to wangle their way into the R-rated comedy “American Pie” will be comparing notes and debating the carefully measured jolts of a high school sex farce that knows exactly how far to push the envelope without seriously offending anyone. Basic bathroom humor, after all, doesn’t have to worry about being politically incorrect. That’s one reason it’s so popular nowadays.
As you may recall, a similar flurry of titillating questions followed the opening a year ago of “There’s Something About Mary,” with its now-infamous hair-gel scene, its zipper crisis and its doggie-on-drugs set pieces. The runaway success of “Mary” suggested that you don’t have to be an adolescent to appreciate such shenanigans.
For buried in the breast of every American grown-up is a smirking 13-year-old sex fiend who used to blush and titter when chancing upon a word like “bosom” in the church hymnal. Like “Mary,” “American Pie” beckons us with a leer and a crooked finger to revisit those thrilling days of lust and disgust and laugh at our own pubescent body shame.
The fact that “American Pie” happens to have more than twice as many gross-out jokes as its forerunner doesn’t mean that this studiously raunchy movie, directed by Paul Weitz from a screenplay by Adam Herz, is twice as funny. Quite the opposite. “American Pie,” whose dirty jokes are inserted at regular intervals like pop songs to perk up the action, lacks the antic levity of the Farrelly brothers’ box-office smash.
There’s no strolling Greek chorus serenading the title character, and no underlying sense of the absurd. More like an upper-middle-class “Porky’s,” “American Pie” is unable to transcend its own dirty mind. Among this year’s bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient. It may well be the biggest hit.
“American Pie” follows four boys, all high school seniors somewhere in Michigan, who make a pact to lose their virginity by the end of the school year. The dumbest and horniest is Jim (Jason Biggs), a compulsive onanist who resembles a younger, more addlebrained Adam Sandler with a roll of baby fat. Poor Jim’s experiments in self-pleasure, which include a bout with one of Mom’s freshly baked apple pies (let’s not even think of the Oedipal implications), are inevitably interrupted by the untimely intrusion of his father (Eugene Levy), who is only too eager to lecture his son on the birds and bees.
Jim’s quest to certify his own manhood eventually leads him to stage an embarrassing online striptease and sex show and to ask Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), a mousy flute-playing classmate (and latent dominatrix), to the senior prom. On their big night Michelle undergoes the kind of instant personality transformation that can only happen in mindless, exploitative comedy.
The jock of the group is Oz (Chris Klein), a handsome lumbering star of the high school lacrosse team who shambles around with a big grin and is in dire need of tutoring in the techniques of seduction. Oz is so determined to score with smart, self-possessed Heather (Mena Suvari) that he joins the high school jazz choir in which she is a soloist, and the two become Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald-like songbirds entwining their voices in an excruciating version of “How Sweet It Is.” Klein, who suggests Keanu Reeves as a dumb pumped-up lug, brings the same oafish charm to Oz that he brought to his very similar role in “Election.”
Rounding out the foursome are Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), a bookish pseudo-sophisticate who spreads false rumors about his own sexual prowess, and the earnest, college-bound Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), who spends the whole movie wheedling his steady girlfriend Vicky (Tara Reid) into going all the way.
Peripheral phonies include Stifler (Seann W. Scott), a rich, arrogant party-giver who is far too pleased with himself to remain unscathed, and Sherman (Chris Owen), a smug high school braggart whose vaunted conquests sound too good to be true. Finally, we have Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth), a sexually precocious exchange student from Eastern Europe; Jessica (Natasha Lyonne), a wisecracking know-it-all who claims to have been “duped” out of her virginity, and Stifler’s mother (Jennifer Coolidge), a bleary-eyed late-90’s Mrs. Robinson.
In parading its jokes as proudly and crassly as an oldtime burlesque show, “American Pie” portrays a teen-age culture that harks weirdly back to the 1950’s. These teen-agers may have computers and be familiar with gangsta rap, but they’re as naive, gawky and embarrassed about sex as high school students were 40 years ago.
As much as they joke about sex, the issues of virginity and old-fashioned notions of good girls versus bad really do matter in this culture (as they also do in the recent, more sophisticated “Cruel Intentions”). Almost without exception, these teen-agers exhibit varying degrees of sexual performance anxiety. Even the best-looking are visibly uncomfortable in their bodies. You can feel the dogs of a re-surgent American Puritanism snapping at their heels.
American Pie (1999)
Directed by: Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz
Starring: Jason Biggs, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Tara Reid, Mena Suvari, Seann William Scott, Eugene Levy, Natasha Lyonne, Jennifer Coolidge, Shannon Elizabeth
Screenplay by: Adam Herz
Production Design by: Paul Peters
Cinematography by: Richard Crudo
Film Editing by: Priscilla Nedd-Friendly
Costume Design by: Leesa Evans
Set Decoration by: Amy Wells
Art Direction by: Paul Peters
Music by: David Lawrence
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexuality, crude sexual dialogue, language and drinking, all involving teens.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: July 9, 1999
Hits: 1509
