“Tanner Hall” is an aesthetically well-packaged yet unimpressive coming-of-age movie that relies too much on stereotypes. Taking place at a prestigious all-girls boarding school, this is a story about four teenage girls as they navigate the murky waters of impending adulthood. Fernanda is pensive and also the voice of reason among her best friends: sexy, flirtatious Kate and tomboy Lucasta. The dynamic between this trio, as well as the lives of the faculty and the other students, gets shaken up by the arrival of Fernanda’s childhood friend, the moderately sadistic and manipulative Victoria. When Fernanda starts an illicit affair with an older married man, Victoria hatches up a cruel plan to humiliate her, all while she actively torments all those around her. However, before the school year is over, each member of this mismatched foursome confronts her own hidden desires and fears, while taking her first step towards long-avoided adulthood in her own idiosyncratic way.
Initially, “Tanner Hall” starts with a very promising set-up; four seemingly different girls living in a secluded mansion-turned-boarding-school surrounded by wilderness and odd teachers, with a praise-worthy alternative soundtrack in the background. The characters and the story promises us that it’s going to edgy places. Unfortunately, it never does. The main reason for that is none of the characters ever turn three-dimensional or intriguing. It feels like every single character was strictly modeled after a stereotype without a tint of originally. We have the tomboy-lesbian, the bitch, the slutty-virgin, and the wallflower, whose individual cliché-ridden stories never go beyond the plastic labels assigned to them. That’s a criminal waste of great talent, since all four of the young actresses are far more than capable of acting out complex characters. Especially, Brie Larson who was beyond spectacular as the precocious, fun-loving Kate in Showtime’s “United States of Tara.”
In terms of the script: the pacing of the film is slow and dull, but worse, it feels like it was constructed around passé boarding school anecdotes of the writers. The writers’ attempts to make the movie realistic and down-to-earth also sadly rob this movie out of any pizzazz. From the get-go, the film teases us into thinking that something emotionally intense and disturbing is going to go down at the end, some horribleness possibly orchestrated by Victoria since she is set up as the main antagonist. Futilely, we wait and wait for that final punch that’s going to bring all the disjointed stories together and leave the audience with a jolt. Instead of that, the movie ends with a clean happy end that could make even a Hallmark card nauseous.
Besides all this, the movie has some serious contextual problems; it aims to say a lot but it ends up saying nothing substantial. There are way too many subplots and characters that occupy screen-time for no valid reason. Neither the themes nor the motifs of the movie come together to create a meaningful collage that is something more than glimpses of life at a boarding school. Worse, in a highly amateurish manner, the movie oscillates between different moods and philosophies too randomly. One minute there’s a comical scene out of an over-enthusiastic wife harassing her husband for some ‘sexy’ time, the next minute the movie would literally go out of its way to give us a preachy lesson about how wrong it is when young girls use their sexuality as a power tool. More over, the film style is too inconsistent and too in-between genres to make a lasting impact of any kind. Plainly, there is not enough drama for it to be considered a drama movie and while it has a few funny parts this is definitely not a comedy.
Luckily, not everything about “Tanner Hall” is terrible. The locales and boarding school atmosphere were both very detail oriented and remarkable. The cinematography was striking and it has a hip soundtrack that succinctly captures the high-ups and low-downs of growing up…now if only this movie had a better script with actual characters, as opposed to cardboard stereotypes… Cinematically, this movie undoubtfully falls short of perfect, but it would have been a pleasant watch had it been released as a made-for-TV movie.