Movie Review:

Mean Girls

    Movies spawned by Saturday Night Live tend to be pretty hit and miss.  For every Blues Brothers or Wayne's World there's at least one It's Pat or The Ladies Man.  These are just the films that spin off directly from skits, of course; there are plenty of films that get made on the strength of people associated initially with SNL, such as most of Chris Farley's movie career.

    Lorne Michaels serves as producer again on Mean Girls, SNL head writer Tina Fey's first film writing credit.  Unquestionably, the effort falls on the funnier end of the spectrum, but the film itself is remarkably inconsistent, which in the end makes it more of a trifle.

    Based on, interestingly, a non-fiction book about high school cliques, Mean Girls tracks Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who has been home-schooled for her whole life because of her globe-trotting parents.  When they move into the Chicago suburbs because of her mother's new university job, Cady must adapt to life in - gasp! - public high school.

    Mean Girls is the sort of film that intersperses comedy with bits of self-important pontification.  Cady gets a voice-over track, during which she tends to explain how things would play out in "the animal world," which is then accompanied by shots of students getting down on all fours and screeching.

    It's vaguely amusing, but the notion is that, while Cady is very intelligent, she really has no idea what it's like dealing with kids her age on a day-to-day basis and has to resort to hiding within things she knows.  She grows out of this quickly enough when she meets the "Plastics," a three-girl clique that, inexplicably, provides the coolness standard for the entire school.  Really?  Three?  I haven't been in high school in a few years, but I don't think a school would be so in awe of three girls, especially when they only seem to be friends with each other.

    Perhaps that's why the leader, Regina (Rachel McAdams), seems so insistent on bringing Cady into their ranks - she finally had someone else she thought she could be friends with.  Maybe it was because she found someone who didn't know her history.  Either way, we can only speculate, because it's certainly never explained why Regina insists on latching on.

    It probably is because everyone else hates her, which again raises the question of why she should be such a gold standard whom most students seem to feel the need to suck up to.  The film posits that high school girls are nice to each other's faces and conduct insidious wars behind each other's backs.  Of course, if you've ever had a high school girl in your family, you already know this.

    Cady proceeds to become so Plastic that she eventually topples Regina and takes over the group, at which point Regina decides to get revenge and eventually the whole school is embroiled in what had been this private little war (over - shock! - a guy).  Cady has lost track of who she's really supposed to be, intentionally failing classes to complete the image.  This is - wait for it - bad, as the quirky friend characters (goth girl Janis and gay guy Damian) point out for us.

    Something worth noting - which the film touches on but doesn't really explore, to its detriment - is that while we have the non-Plastic friends to note what goes so wrong with Cady, those friends aren't that much better, in the end.  Cady's initiation into the Plastics is due mostly to the prodding of Janis, who wants to use Cady to subvert the group from the inside to settle a score dating to eighth grade.  Janis is later presented as the voice of reason, however, which seems particularly hypocritical as by the end she is really shown as not having changed or learned much of anything.  It's okay, of course - because she's not attractive, and the Plastics are.  It's what I call Shallow Hal syndrome: in that film, the concept was that Jack Black could only see inner beauty, but the film hyperbolized it, making only people who were physically unattractive in reality look attractive to Hal, because only they were nice people.  Janis and Damian, despite being no better than anyone else, get to be the voices of reason because they're not popular; they just serve as unattractive joke dispensers.

    Nearly all of Fey's previous writing came on SNL, and it's pretty obvious.  Many pieces set in the high school feel like little self-contained skits that one wouldn't be surprised to see turn up on the small screen, complete with live studio audience.  This is particularly true of the appearances of Tim Meadows as the principal, Mr. Duvall, and Fey herself as beleaguered math teacher Ms. Norbury.  Their scenes are among the funniest - Fey actually delivers a rather impressive performance considering the film and the role - but they also betray the mentality of a skit writer.  Remove the lukewarm comment on high school life, and the film could probably have just appeared as a series of skits on SNL.

    The film's final problem is the end, which basically neuters the film's entire premise by having Cady resolve everything with a speech at the spring dance.  Then suddenly everyone in the school gets along, as if magically washed by the goodness of Cady's revelation that being a selfish backstabber maybe wasn't winning her any popularity contests (though she is named queen of the dance anyway).  The film's point is that girls are mean and that isn't so good.  The expectation that human nature is so easily changed, however, feels like a cheap way out.  While it wasn't always on the mark, Fey's writing had made the film edgier; it stood apart from the general Hollywood teen-marketing pap.  The ending is safe as safe can be, and has the cutesy little can't-we-all-just-get-along message to go with it.  It feels out of place, as though Fey simply couldn't come up with a better way to end things.  (In fact, the point at which Regina gets hit by a bus while arguing with Cady feels like a symbol for what the film is about to do to itself.)

    This seems fairly harsh, no doubt, but the film is certainly not all bad.  It's fairly funny for most of the running time, thanks largely to Fey and Meadows' characters as well as to Janis and Damian, who have a lot of good repartee.  Lohan is well-cast in her role, as she effortlessly shifts from bright-eyed naif to evil scheme-stress and is perfectly believable in both.  It helps that she's the right age; the Plastics (McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried) are a bit old and they look it, but then most film high schools are stocked with people who have long since graduated, so this is a small quibble.

    In the end, Mean Girls delivers a pretty good number of laughs.  It tries a bit too hard at nailing home a message that it can't quite pull off, but this doesn't kill the film entirely, just weakens it.   Despite its loftier goals, Mean Girls works best as a disposable bit of slightly edgy comedy.  B-

Mean Girls is a Paramount Pictures release.  Rated for sexual content, language and some teen partying.