Movie Review

Mean Girls (PG-13)

Gregory Freitas

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Hollywood.com Says
Well shy of classic, Mean Girls lacks both Heathers' and Election's commitment to its darker instincts and Clueless' indelible characterizations, but it's still probably the best teen comedy in years, and certainly the best SNL movie since Tommy Boy. Faint praise? Like, totally.

Story
If you've seen Heathers, Clueless or Jawbreaker, then you've seen Mean Girls. Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) is the new girl, having moved from Africa where she was raised (one of many comic head-scratchers that goes nowhere), and now trying to win friends in a hostile new high school environment. On the verge of becoming--gasp!--friends with two geeks, one gay and one Goth, she is invited to join "The Plastics" (Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried), the coolest girls on campus. When she develops an unfortunate crush on the head Plastics' ex-boyfriend (Jonathan Bennett), the girls declare war on each other and all hell breaks loose. Saturday Night Live regulars Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Tim Meadows and Ana Gasteyer fill in the adult roles, and Fey wrote the script as well.

Acting
Lohan has star power in spades, and enough going on behind the eyes to at least suggest the inner life and back story absent from the script. She conveys Cady's sudden character changes with aplomb, and her comic timing is excellent. McAdams makes the biggest impression with the showiest "Plastics" role and is certainly someone to watch for in the future. Her Regina George is one of the funniest, nastiest high school girls since Election's Tracy Flick. Bennett is likeable in a one-note jock role, and Daniel Franzese and Lizzy Caplan are similarly stereotyped as the Gay and the Goth, respectively. Of the adults, Poehler, who is always funny, stands out as Regina's alcoholic, mini-skirted mother. Fey wisely and selflessly wrote herself a straight-man role as the calculus teacher. And Meadows as the principal, quite simply, has never been funnier. Whether he has ever been funny before is another question.

Direction
To take on a project already burdened with two strikes--Teen Comedy and SNL Movie--is either a bold move or career suicide, but director Mark S. Waters doesn't need to worry. He does a nice job of staying out of the way, and tells the story simply without relying too heavily on fruit-flavored set design, drowning every scene in music, or ruining the witty laughs with too much slapstick. And it is a very witty script, sharply observed and rich in detail. (The Halloween party scene, showing every single girl wearing lingerie and a different set of animal ears, stands out.) Fey adapted sociologist Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction best-seller Queen Bees & Wannabees, and the interaction between the various species of teen is note perfect. That said, Fey seems to have been given a lot of leeway due to her stature on SNL, and it shows. One example: everyone has trouble pronouncing Cady's name, which wasn't funny the first time and still isn't 500 times later. The movie also attempts to impart a message of female solidarity, but by building the characters on the same cookie-cutter stereotypes it denounces, its girl power is undermined. Plus, the movie seems cut to within an inch of its life. If it is possible for a comedy to move too quickly, Mean Girls does, as Waters furiously connects the dots without consideration for the characters or the audience. It's like watching schizophrenics at a track meet--but maybe that's the point.

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Everyone's a Critic

"Mean Girls has the same fancifully dead-on tone as the 1995 high-school comedy Clueless without the sweetness because, hey, these snits are mean."
Mike Clark, USA Today

"Director Waters and screenwriter Tina Fey aim less for the usual high-gloss caricature than acutely hilarious sociology, nailing the servile malice of 15-year-old girls…"
Jessica Winter, Village Voice

"Mean Girls may be slim pickings compared to Heathers and Donnie Darko, but it still makes mincemeat out of something like 13 Going on 30."
Ed Gonzales, Slant Magazine

"[Lindsay Lohan] never allows the character to tilt into caricature, and for that matter even the Plastics seem real, within their definitions of themselves, and not like the witch-harridans of some teenage movies."
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"The difference between gleefully amoral '80s movies like Heathers and a contemporary teen comedy is that nowadays, the claws tend to get retracted so Hollywood can bludgeon the audience with heavy-handed sermonizing about self-worth and being kind to each other."
Lou Lumenick, New York Post