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Kirsten Dunst wasn’t cut out for teen movies. At least, not the kind movie studios were making money off of at the turn of the millennium. Dunst was the right age to make hay of the post-Scream era that brought Can’t Hardly Wait, She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, and American Pie to the screen, but during this exact period, she was starring in the hilarious and surprisingly nuanced box office flop Dick, a teen comedy pairing her with Michelle Williams, and placing them opposite Watergate-era Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya); the later-beloved black comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous; and Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Virgin Suicides. So yeah, around the time that a bunch of her peers were doing coordinated dances at the behest of a piped-in Usher, Dunst was performing on-screen suicide with her gilded-cage sisters. Her one teen-movie success of the era was Bring It On, a movie that took the prevailing cartooniness of these movies as permission to get a little weirder and edgier. She pointedly failed to capitalize on its popularity.
Miramax, however, tried their best – to capitalize, I mean – with Get Over It, a little-seen teen comedy released 25 years ago this month. Shot just before Bring It On hit and released half a year later, it only feels appropriate that Dunst, whose energy even as a younger performer was often suffused with a sense of melancholy or disappointment, would show up for the genre’s dying gasp.
It’s not that there weren’t any teen comedies after the spring of 2001. American Pie 2 was a big hit just a few months later. But that specifically boy-band-era Abercrom-com was fading fast, and Get Over It was not exactly its blaze of glory. Like some of its predecessors, the movie is nominally a Shakespeare adaptation, in this case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or, as a drama teacher memorably played by Martin Short puts it: “Classical Shakespeare with a contemporary musical twist.” He’s winkingly describing the school-play-within-the-film, for which the surly and untalented Berke Landers (Ben Foster) auditions, hoping to win back his beloved ex-girlfriend Allison (Melissa Sagemiller). He gets help from his co-star Kelly (Dunst), also the younger sister of his pal Felix (Colin Hanks). In classic early-millennial fashion, the cast includes some now-big stars in supporting roles, namely Mila Kunis and Zoe Saldaña.
Photo: ©Dimension Films/Everett CollectionMost of the then-young cast is charming enough, though Short mischievously steals every single scene he’s in, essentially playing a younger, meaner, less successful version of his name-dropping theatrical impresario from Only Murders in the Building. However, as funny as Short is (and it really is one of his better film roles), he may not be quite as hilarious as the sight of Ben Foster inexplicably playing the hangdog romantic hero of a silly teen movie with an endless seething rage that seems perpetually moments away from exploding into a psychological drama about a school shooter. Rather than a dedicated basketball player unexpectedly awakening to the joys of musical theater, Berke comes across more like a scarred soldier taking the briefest of respites in a shore leave that he knows will leave his psychological problems unresolved.
By comparison, Dunst seems like a perfect fit, simply because she seems to have seen movies like this before and developed an understanding of how to behave in one. Given that her character is an aspiring songwriter, she would make way more sense as a lead for this movie that is, at its heart, a thwarted musical. In a lot of ways, Get Over It resembles a version of She’s All That, reconfigured for a slightly increased willingness follow the music-video instinct that informs that aforementioned prom dance sequence. Its opening credits unfold over a long take of a furious, dejected Berke carrying a box of his things away from his ex-girlfriend’s house while bedeviled by former pop star Vitamin C lip-syncing to Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” attracting a variety of dancing extras along the way. A little later, two different characters sing a cappella versions of Elvis Costello’s “Alison.” The movie even gives a young Sisqó a more substantial role than Usher’s equivalent part in She’s All That.
But weirdly, when the movie begins spending time on the musical set, the songs recede for a while, in favor of gross-out gags, slapstick, and some truly uncomfortable periodic screams of agony from Foster. Eventually, the movie unveils its in-world musical, but the point (however lightly made) is that most of the songs are hacky pastiches making a corny attempt to “modernize” Shakespeare. A pivotal moment arrives when Kelly’s own composition replaces the planned song “Pocket Full of Dreams” (“down here, we call it ‘Pocket Full of Ass,'” grouses a member of the orchestra, in one of the movie’s few funny lines that doesn’t come from Short). Dunst supposedly took the role because it allowed for some singing, something she later did in Spider-Man 3. As with everything she does, Dunst imbues the performance with feeling — probably more than it deserves. Briefly, it feels like she’s singing this uneven genre to sleep. Then Sisqó and Vitamin C play it off screen with an end-credits song-and-dance number very obviously designed to get the movie above the 80-minute mark that it otherwise wouldn’t clear. All in all, a dumb way to go out. But not bad for 2001.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
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