Bad Teacher (2011)

★
Navy ships have a form of self-defense called chaff. Upon sighting incoming missiles, the ship will fire chaff into the air and lure the missile into targeting it. Chaff can also be used to confuse enemy radar. Bad Teacher, a morally inept movie, launches chaff in the form of adult humor to distract from the fact that its main character is getting away with murder. Cameron Diaz's Elizabeth Halsey is a useless and self-absorbed teacher who isn't interested in providing her students with a quality education but would rather show them movies so that she can sleep off her hangover at her desk. Chaff is effective. This movie has some funny scenes that deflected my attempts to pierce through its defenses and see its shortcomings. Eventually the chaff supply runs out, leaving the movie's flaws exposed. Moving in for the kill, I was astonished by the story's disregard for Elizabeth's actions, making her out to be heroic and giving her a happy ending when she should have an ominous one.

Elizabeth Halsey is leaving her profession to marry a rich guy. The speaker at her farewell party reveals that she only taught at the school for one year, inviting observations that she did the bare minimum. She goes home and loudly announces to her fiancé that she can't wait to give him a blowjob, except that she finds his mother there on the couch. That's the first shot of chaff, and it works because it's funny. The fiancé drops a bombshell. He's calling off the wedding because she's only after his money. Elizabeth returns to work the following fall humiliated, though she amusingly pins the blame on her "cheating" fiancé. Back at school, she gets reacquainted with Lynn Davies (Phyllis Smith), a fellow teacher who follows her around like a faithful puppy. Elizabeth also meets the new substitute teacher Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) and, after viewing his girlfriend's photo, decides to get a boob job to become more attractive. She also runs into Amy Squirrel, the only teacher who can see through the façade.

Miss Halsey's quest for a boob job mainly involves raising the funds from a variety of sources and using shady tactics to achieve her ends. For starters, she organizes the school car wash and attracts customers by showing off her wet body. It works, and the fund raiser is a success, though Amy suspects that Elizabeth stole from the pot, while Principal Snur (John Michael Higgins) isn't convinced. Her biggest scheme involves winning a $50,000 prize for having the highest scoring classroom on a state exam. She comes up with a plan to steal the answers from the administrator's office and teach to that in order to secure the victory. As all this plays out, Amy searches for evidence to bring Elizabeth down, while Elizabeth provides escort on a field trip and gives a boy confidence by loaning him her bra. Her teaching methods, once she finally decides to devote time to it, are unorthodox but mildly amusing, like conducting lessons on the basketball court. Not all the jokes work. There's a cringy sex scene between Elizabeth and Scott, who prefers dry humping while fully clothed. It's an unsightly visual, but the climax is worse.

In summary, Elizabeth cheats her way through the school year, deprives the students of an education and embezzles money to pay for bigger breasts. Bad Teacher presents Elizabeth as a hugely negative influence and fires chaff in all directions to distance her actions from their consequences. The movie's biggest misstep is the ending. She becomes the school guidance counselor and starts dating the nice gym coach. She never gets her breasts enlarged. Amy is out of the picture. All is well. Basically, she gets away with everything and the movie ends. I do not object to endings like this, if the movie earns it. The bad guys sometimes win and walk away unscathed. A movie's attitude towards its triumphant villain matters, though. Are we supposed to scorn Elizabeth for her actions or go along for the ride because it's occasionally funny?

I can think of dozens of good to great movies in which the primary motivator for the lead's actions was to achieve a dubious goal. Just to name a few: American Pie, Ocean's 11, True Romance, American Psycho. Some or all of these movies had something to say about their characters' situations or the time in which they took place, or defined the victims and how they would be affected, or conceptualized the scale of their plots, or accepted their characters' actions with ironic detachment. There are plenty of other boxes that could be check marked. I don't apply a set of rules that need to be satisfied in order to justify a movie's existence. This is more like a list of trends that I've noticed when I like a movie yet disapprove of the main characters' actions. I don't pretend to be consistent. When all else fails, the entertainment factor alone could be enough to justify the movie's reason for being.

When I see Bad Teacher's bad teacher at the end with her own office, hired as the school's guidance counselor with no context (what exactly is her educational background anyway?) and put in charge of developing students' minds every year, I wonder if the writers were smoking the same thing Elizabeth smokes. At this point, does it matter that Cameron Diaz gave a spirited performance? Recall that Bad Santa's safecracker thief Willie didn't get away with it. His partner betrayed him, and the cops shot him in the back.

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