Review: "Mean Girls" (2004)
Where the hell did THIS come from?
The closest thing to "buzz" that "Mean Girls" managed to generate prior to it's release were some magazine puff peices about the rising-star status of lead actress Lindsay Lohan. It didn't even get the usual attention obligated for films connected to the "Saturday Night Live" franchise, despite being produced by Lorne Michaels, written by comic Tina Fey and having a solid chunk of it's "grownup" cast comprised of SNL veterans (Tim Meadows plays a principal, Fey herself turns up as a math teacher.)
Now it's a major surprise hit, the #1 movie in America this past weekend and earning some of the best reviews of any comedy this year.
Something extraordinary has happened here: Someone has actually made a funny, accessible, mainstream teen comedy set in a High School that is smart, insightful and witty and got it released to major theaters WITHOUT a tie-in hip-pop soundtrack OR untalented pretty-faces from WB sitcoms taking up space in key roles. Something ever MORE extraordinary happened after that: The teen-comedy audience is GOING TO SEE IT. In droves. Multiple times.
Teenagers going to see GOOD movies? This could upset the whole system.
Plot is actually pretty basic: 17 year-old Cady (Lohan) enters a typical suburban High School after having been homeschooled by her parents for all years prior (out of necessity, they were globetrotting researchers in Africa during her previous school-age years.) She's a misfit, completely unprepared for American teenaged life and all it's myriad complexities.
It looks, briefly, like the stage is set for a much more deeply cynical film than eventually emerges: Cady is 'taken in' by a pair of non-conformists (a 'goth' chick and a guy described as 'almost too gay to function') who help her navigate the cliques and subcultures that make up and divide the student body. It'd be easy, from this point, to turn the film into a cynical "high school is hell" flaying of the culture, but the film has something different in mind: Getting "inside" the psychology of teenage cliques to understand why they exist in the first place.
The school, we learn, is culturally-dominated by a trio of "perfect" girls called "The Plastics." The leader of the group, Regina, dictates through her very existance the fashion, culture and mood of the entire student body. At first, Cady is warned against them by her new friends. But when The Plastics take an interest in "helping" Cady into popular-hood her friends urge her to go for it. The reason? 'goth' chick has a major axe to grind with Regina, and Cady will be an undercover operative in a mission to destroy The Plastics from within.
But the film is "really" about the sabotage, either. What it's mostly about is Cady's experience being inducted into "Plastic-hood" and the myriad reasons she finds it both repellant AND exciting. The film is written with a keen, knowing wit. It understands, and makes a central theme, out of the sobering reality that the need of some of the students to destroy the Plastics and all that they stand for is just as much of a pathology as the need of the rest of the students to make goddesses of them.
And when things go bad, as they always do in such films, Cady isn't our aloof superior narator condeming the "ignorance" of American teens; she's a hugely culpable in the chaos that engulfs the final act, and the film manages to turn it's hero into an EXAMPLE of it's message rather than lecturing us on the evil's of clique-hood.
At all turns, the film sets up potentially-cliche scenes that would be crushing bores in lesser comedies and instead finds opportunity to go in surprising new directions. There's an "unauthorized" party at a house with out-of-town parents, but instead of "don't break that!" jokes the film focuses on the character moments taking place. There's a "sexy dance" by the Plastics at a talent show, but while it's fun to see the "hotties" in skimpy Santa suits the scene is REALLY about the shifting "ranks" of the clique. A school-wide riot? Yup, the film has one... but it's cause and resolution are about as atypical as they can probably get. A major character suffers a "funny" injury, but the "joke" actually ends at the punchline and has REAL implications of the story.
Have you ever thought you hated a certain food until you had it prepared "properly" and found you liked it? Watching this film, and realizing how many ways it goes right where other teen comedies go wrong, is like that.
For me, the most pleasant surprise here is seeing Tim Meadows (late of "The Ladies Man") as the principal. Usually, this is a throwaway role in these films... but Meadows steps up and delivers a performance that is 100% straight and real. He can act. He can act DAMN WELL. It's a small role, but it could have been a broad caricature and it isn't: It feels real, I believed this was a principal of a high school. Where has Meadows been hiding this talent for drama? And WHY?
This is the best mainstream teen comedy I've seen in at least a decade, smart and clever in a way most films aimed at ANY age group almost never are. If you've got teens looking to see this , LET THEM. If you've got daughters, DEFINATELY take them. Teenagers need all the films like this they can get.
Summary: Highly, HIGHLY reccomended.
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