Review
MEANGIRLS
Starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Tina Fey
Directed by Mark S. Waters
Opens Friday, April 30
Check listings
When Tina Fey was profiled in The New Yorker she revealed that she was a mean girl in high school. Fey described herself as a fairly unpopular teenager who despised the kids that partook in the classic triumvirate of adolescent sins: drinking, drugs and sex. Fey admitted that her time in high school was a central inspiration for her screenplay, Mean Girls.
Based on Queen Bees and Wannabes, a parent’s guide to helping their adolescent daughters through the horrors of high school, Mean Girls tells the story of a naïve, heretofore home-schooled teenager starting at a Chicago high school who quickly becomes all-too comfortable with her catty classmates.
Produced by Lorne Michaels and featuring a group of Saturday Night Live alums and current players, including Fey and Tim Meadows, Mean Girls is one of the more dignified (mostly) and sharper comedies to come out of the SNL machine. Unlike the typical sketch-to-film vehicles that SNL is known for spawning, like A Night at the Roxbury or Superstar, Mean Girls is more committed to telling a story than simply setting up scenarios that could provoke a laugh. Unfortunately, in the end, Mean Girls isn’t as black a comedy as it needs to be. When the film should bare its teeth and go in for the kill it reveals its heart, painted all too obviously on its sleeve.
Lindsey Lohan stars as Cady Heron, a fresh-faced teenager who’s spent her formative years living and traveling with her parents in Africa. Untouched by the hands of MTV and American Idol, Cady shows up at high school only to realize it houses a vicious wildlife of its own – teenagers. When Cady befriends two outsiders – Janis (Lizzy Caplan), a bitter Goth and her effeminate sidekick Damian (Daniel Franzese) – she agrees to join the elite all-girl band that rules over the school, The Plastics, as something of a double agent. Intending to humiliate and topple the group, especially their leader Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Cady gets too comfy in her newfound role.
Surprisingly, Mean Girls isn’t rife with sight gags or cruel tricks. Instead of capturing a war of attrition in which the popular girls get their comeuppance, the film chronicles the ebb and flow of Cady’s conversion to plasticity. Although there’s a mix of good gags and cheap shots, Mean Girls doesn’t have as much bite as it should.
Ironically Fey, who plays a bookish math teacher that coaxes Lohan back to nicedom, doesn’t follow through with the edgy possibilities set up in her script. Since the comedienne’s success on SNL comes as much from her whip-smart repartee as her unabashed willingness to be politically incorrect and cruel, it’s surprising that sensibility becomes so watered down in the film’s last leg. When Fey’s script offers a simplistic ideal of an adolescent bubble in which the girls start to respect each other and everyone is, gasp, nice, the situation is not only unfunny, it’s preposterous. |
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