Teen Spleen
Mean Girls could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t — it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms — but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago) produced by Lorne Michaels and based on a nonfiction book (Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes) that concerns … ooh, girls sassing each other.
Well, miracles occasionally happen. With a wink at John Hughes and a Band-Aid for Columbine, Mean Girls belly-flops into the increasingly complicated American high school experience with a healthy reservoir of wit. Credit screenwriter Tina Fey (Saturday Night Live) and director Mark Waters (the fun Freaky Friday remake, The House of Yes) for festooning their teen flick with strings of knowing giggles for the over-18 crowd.
Our perky protagonist is Cady (Freaky Friday‘s Lindsay Lohan, nicely restrained), who was raised and home-schooled in Africa by her adventurous parents until fate and failing funds adjusted the missionaries’ position to an impossibly congenial suburbia that the movie claims is in Illinois. A teen tabula rasa, or so it would seem, Cady (pronounced Katie, she reminds everyone) enters North Shore High School blissfully unaware of cliques, including cool Asians, dork Asians, art fags, jocks and, of course, Heathers … er … plastics — here they’re called plastics!
That’s right — there’s a trio of anti-social young ladies here who toe the line of teen-girl plausibility by wearing jeans only once a week. They quickly become fascinated by the “new meat” at school, who hasn’t claimed a clique. Brusque blonde Regina (Rachel McAdams) invites Cady to join their table in that occupied zone the cafeteria, and before long they’re sniffing one another out. Along with dippy Karen (newcomer Amanda Seyfried), who claims meteorological insight based on the whims of her boobs, and dippier Gretchen (Party of Five‘s Lacey Chabert), who gloats over her family’s toaster-strudel fortune, the girlie gang hits — what else? — the mall.
Given the African subtheme, we get an amusing faux-tribal score from Rolfe Kent and images of teen “animals” around the “watering hole” that is the mall’s fountain, revealing — like, duh — that it’s a jungle out there. Deep in the bush of the ‘burbs, Cady swiftly finds her loyalties tested between the plastics and her artsy friends Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), the latter “so gay he can barely function.” Then there’s boy toy Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), who offers to tutor the severely crushing Cady in math. She feigns ignorance to be near him; of course, all those years of home-schooling in grass huts have made her an ace with equations that would stump Stephen Hawking.
Under the watchful yet completely laissez-faire eye of Regina’s ditzy mother (Amy Poehler, channeling Beverly D’Angelo), the plastics have created an evil “Burn Book.” The tome holds secrets, lies and random insults adversely affecting everyone at school, including the faculty. Apart from exposing some pedophilia, the book starts ruining mostly innocent lives in a chaotic chain-reaction, and principal Duvall (Tim Meadows, hilariously deadpan) puts out an APB on the culprits.
Admittedly, some of the gags here feel threadbare, and the hit-by-a-bus shocker lifted wholesale from Final Destination 2 didn’t need repeating here. But most of the chuckles score. You gotta love a film that poses the vital question: “Is butter a carb?”
Quirky dialogue is definitely Fey’s strong suit, even if her candor about peeing and tampons doesn’t match the Shakespearean heights of pithy vulgarity from Heathers. But doing anything gently with a chainsaw doesn’t seem to be her goal anyway. Rather, she and Waters give us a lead teen girl with an actual full character arc — naïveté to bitchiness to balance — muddling through a high school that’s so funny it’s almost real. What could have withered into a feature-length detention ends up feeling like a homecoming ball.
