Hop on Pop

The Babysitters Directed by David Ross

Has anyone ever stopped to wonder how those golden boys and girls from high school react to high school movies? From Heathers to Juno, they get short shrift. Even Molly Ringwald’s princess in The Breakfast Club finds happiness with Judd Nelson’s brooding and dangerous bad boy. But as long as high school remains a life requirement, high school movies will continue to be made. That The Babysitters is not a stronger film is too bad, because it happily gives voice to a group of teens who have previously remained unheard: those who coolly pick and choose their morals.

With just a wisp of a plot—senior Shirley (Katherine Waterston) finds herself the madam of a teenage babysitting bordello—writer/director Ross uses his film to paint a picture of ambitious schoolgirls who cheerfully reconcile getting middle-aged dads off in exchange for a tip on top of their usual fees. Shirley, a Type A who spends her downtime on the job scrubbing kitchen floors before spending it on her back, is the kind of adoring, reticent girl who’s catnip to frustrated hottie father Michael (John Leguizamo), trapped with a wife (Cynthia Nixon, not given much to do) who has forsaken booze and drugs for a life of nitpicking and criticizing.

After a quick bite at a diner and a romantic exploration of the rail yard, Michael and Shirley kiss in his SUV—prompting him to give her a suitably large bonus to ease his guilty conscience. Not for long, of course, since Shirley has a crush on him and is more than willing to give it up as often as he’d like. Unable to keep his trap shut about the underage piece of ass he’s snagged, Michael tells his friends, and they all want a little extra somethin’ somethin’ from their babysitters, too. So, initially unwilling to sully what she has with Michael, Shirley enlists her bad-girl friend Melissa (Lauren Birkell) to take a shift—with a finder’s fee for Shirley, of course. And before you can say “Heidi Fleiss,” their uptight friend Brenda is in on the fun, too. But we all know about dirty old men; and even these tough, money-minded girls get a little freaked out when a weekend in the country gets scary after drugs are introduced. Even worse, Brenda and her sister start questioning Shirley’s authority, leading to one of the best high-school-girl hissyfits ever captured on film.

But before visions of Heathers start dancing in your heads, be warned—The Babysitters lacks the comforting Brothers Grimm fairy-tale quality of that quintessential teen movie (or even the Disney fairy-tale quality of Mean Girls). Ross has made his movie far more serious and dark than either of those hit movies; and, to a certain extent, the final product is negatively affected. The audience roots for Shirley and Melissa to succeed; who hasn’t wanted to turn the tables on drooling older men and take advantage of them for a change? And it’s not as if they aren’t being compensated for ignoring the bald patches and growing paunches that most of them carry without an ounce of self-consciousness (except Leguizamo, of course). But these pint-sized Thelma and Louises, who have so successfully subverted the Lolita fetish that so many men have, begin turning on each other.

By undermining the subtle feminism of his movie, Ross ends up undermining the whole thing, culminating in a terrifying parking-lot scene that doesn’t quite make sense. It’s only Waterston’s steely performance and Birkin’s unpredictability that prevents The Babysitters from devolving into a cinematic hand slap. It’s hard to imagine either of these simultaneously cynical and innocent girls unable to accomplish whatever they set out to do in life, shaming the whimsy and coyness of Juno in the process.