'Mean Girls'Get another opinion:
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Tina Fey, Jonathan Bennett, Lizzy Caplan, Ana Gasteyer
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Fey's wit makes 'Mean Girls' a comedy that cliques
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By Omar Gallaga
American-Statesman Staff
Posted: April 30, 2004
For those who remember slam books, JV jocks and the horrors of sex ed in health class, and especially for those young enough to experience it daily, there is "Mean Girls" — a smart comedy from "Saturday Night Live" head writer Tina Fey.
Like its cinematic forebears "Heathers" and "Jawbreaker," "Mean Girls" is about the hellish hierarchy of high school girls, where low-cut jeans and MAC makeup trump honor roll and extracurriculars.
Current teen movie queen Lindsay Lohan ("Freaky Friday") is Cady, a home-schooled girl raised in Africa who is entering public school for the first time. Armed with knowledge about tribal rituals but unprepared for life among the Instant Messaging generation, Cady flails on her first day, struggling to fit in where the lines of clique demarcation are brutally clear.
The Plastics. The JV Jocks. The Art Freaks, Cool Asians and Smart Asians, all with histories together, all with no cause to welcome an outsider. When Cady doesn't find a place to sit in the lunchroom, she eats alone, cafeteria tray balanced on her lap in a bathroom stall.
"Mean Girls" charts Cady's transformation from "New girl from Africa" to official member of the Plastics, a group of navel-baring Britneys-in-training who might remind you of the shopping spree-and-substance-abuse girls in last year's "Thirteen."
But Cady's smarter than that. Even as she admires the Plastics (there's the Dumb One, the Follower and the Queen Bee) and wants desperately to embody their vacuous, potent power, she's infiltrating and sabotaging the group on behalf of Janis and Demian, the only two true friends she's made. (They're an ostracized and very entertaining pair; semi-goth girl and her big gay best friend.)
Cady, of course, can't keep all the plates spinning, and soon her alliances crumble, her crush on a hot boy is exposed and, true to Lohan's on-screen past film performances, Cady need only be herself for everything to work out.
This from the "Saturday Night Live" writer who can routinely be seen calling Christina Aguilera a skank or delivering precise, devastating slams against George W. Bush?
To be fair, Tina Fey's first big outing as a screenwriter (the film is produced by "SNL's" Lorne Michaels) succeeds because of Fey's viciousness, but also due to the goofy, endearing heart with which she infuses the film. There is evidence of Fey's barbed wit in her efficient summations of characters. Breathless to-the-camera testimonials from other students keep many of the principal characters from seeming like caricatures, while Lohan's comic timing and the film's quick pace in the first half establish a setting and a main character who feel authentic. These students have identities, even as they conform to high school subsets. You wonder how Cady will survive among them.
Fey's screenplay is based on "Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence," and the last third of the film struggles with achieving a positive resolution while staying true to the film's no-punches-pulled setup. The script's anthropological humor gibes with its source material, but its "Let's all get along" resolution feels faked.
The film also has a few too many adult characters — Fey is a socially clumsy teacher and Tim Meadows plays a funny but ineffectual principal. Ace comics Neil Flynn ("Scrubs") and Ana Gasteyer play Cady's parents, but we barely see them. The film also has a few abrupt shifts in tone. Scenes that cleverly juxtapose Cady's past and present (a food court fountain subs in for a Serengeti watering hole for apes and lions as alpha girls battle for supremacy) are a far cry from the film's pat finale.
But with its sharp social critique and Fey's broad-ranging styles of humor (she's not above a bus accident joke more suitable for a "Scary Movie" sequel), "Mean Girls" transcends the current glut of Cinderella teen films. It's a film that will make older viewers remember their own high school days, and all the traumas that entails.
ogallaga@statesman.com; 445-3672
