Vibrant, silly, and unwaveringly vulnerable, “Pools” is an invigorating party movie whose non-stop reverie uplifts its protagonist’s downcast spirit. It’s a youthful picture grappling with a painful personal past, the kind of film about teenage grief that was common in YA movies a decade ago, that finds new resonance here. For Odessa A’zion, “Pools” furthers a recent rise for the actress, which found firm momentum with Jennifer Esposito’s gripping mafia story, “Fresh Kills.”
A’zion, whose spontaneous sense of play and emotion proves entrancing, stars as Kennedy, a self-destructive teenage girl attending college in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest on a scholarship. She earned that money by being a top student, scoring a 34 on her ACT, and maintaining a 4.0 GPA. But since her father’s death a year ago, grief’s malaise has unmoored her. She has skipped so many classes that she’s nearing expulsion. Her counselor Mrs. Lewis (Suzanne Cryer) gives her one more chance to either show up to class or lose her scholarship. Kennedy, who describes herself as more like “Robert than Jack,” instead decides to party with her friends.
As you’d expect in a teen hangout movie, none of these kids make for immediate friends. Kennedy approaches the former jock, Reed (Mason Gooding)—he spends his days working out on the quad—to hang out because he’s old enough to buy booze. Though Blake (Tyler Alvarez) is a square studying to be a doctor, he’s also one of the people whose sympathy for Kennedy never diminishes. The group is completed by Delaney (Ariel Winter) and Shane (Francesca Noel) because one was Reed’s ex and the other has a crush on him, respectively. The quintet buys minibar-sized bottles of Malört and makes their way through the ritzy suburb in swimming trunks and bathing suits.
As these teens jump from pool to pool, awakening the livid owners before fleeing into the night, it’s not tricky for Frank Perry’s Burt Lancaster starrer “The Swimmer” to come to mind. Unlike that film, writer/director Sam Hayes isn’t critiquing the fool’s gold of the American dream. At most, he is arguing against the conventional path of higher education in place of a career in the arts. Instead, Hayes taps into the iconography of “The Swimmer” to parallel Lancaster’s futile effort to regain the life he once lived with Kennedy’s hope to feel her father’s presence again.
Despite that nostalgic longing, the raucous energy of the film’s first minute is forward-facing. Beautifully shot oners barely keep up as Kennedy and her friends race through the night. Scenes in the pools shine with a glassy luminosity, as though you’re wading through the heart of a blue crystal. And when the group finally settles into a vacant mansion belonging to Dale (Raymond Fox), they roam and tear through the space with the undaunted vigor of Peter Pan and his lost boys.
By the second half of “Pools,” the narrative waters settle into an uneasy calm. A framing device utilizing a standee falls flat, never fully developing beyond a comedic quirk. Hayes also dispenses with the hilarious crash zooms he so effectively utilized earlier. Instead, the aesthetic becomes quite common and tame, owing to these teens parsing through their attractions and fears. A last-act shift involving an air conditioning repairman (Michael Vlamis) sparks some of the magic again, conjuring a quiet resoluteness in the face of loss.
While “Pools” can get too locked into a joke and too conventional in depicting teenage roadblocks, its sense of overwhelming grief remains palpable due to A’zion. She delivers the kind of careening, explosive performance whose aftershocks make contact with every corner of the frame. She’s simply one of those people who the camera loves. She makes “Pools” worth diving into.
