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Plastic Engineering
Despite its satire on high-school popularity, Mean Girls is too nice.
Mean Girls isn't quite as ambitious, but it still has a good deal of promise. Director Mark Waters, following up on the success last year of his remake of Freaky Friday, should know about Heathers -- his brother Daniel wrote that movie. Waters re-teams with his Freaky Friday star Lindsay Lohan and works from a script by Tina Fey, whose acerbic wit is on display 26 weeks a year as Saturday Night Live's anchorwoman. Everything seems in place for a wickedly bitchy bit of fun, and every once in a while the movie delivers. Yet ... Lohan plays Cady Heron, a girl who's having her maiden experience with the American public education system after 16 years' worth of home-schooling in Africa by her zoologist parents (Neil Flynn and Ana Gasteyer). She initially makes friends with the social outcasts, a scary artsy chick (Lizzy Caplan) and a gay fat guy (Daniel Franzese). Then she catches the attention of The Plastics, the exclusive clique at the top of the school's social totem pole, led by the imperious Regina George (Rachel McAdams). Cady's friends encourage her to cozy up to The Plastics so she can spy on them, turn them against one another, and eventually liberate the school from the tyranny of these self-styled cool girls. However, Cady throws herself into her role too well and becomes seduced by popularity when she realizes that she can replace Regina. The filmmakers give this movie more than its complement of funny business. Waters' flair for slapstick and gags is put to good use yet again. When Cady compares the behavior of high-schoolers to animals in the wild, the teen-age denizens of a shopping mall suddenly start acting like monkeys, with the mall's fountain functioning as a watering hole. Fey does a good job of filtering events through the perspective of Girl World, as Cady calls it: "Halloween is the one day of the year when you can dress like a total slut and no one can say anything." There's also a truly disturbing bit where Regina's 5-year-old sister watches a Girls Gone Wild video and lifts up her shirt in imitation of what she sees. All this notwithstanding, the movie takes a surprisingly serious view of high-school machinations. It's to be commended for this. At the same time, the approach turns out to be a buzzkill. Waters and Fey never seem to quite realize that it's fun to plot the destruction of your enemies, and even more fun when your plan works to perfection. This realization is where the quest for teen popularity shades over into sociopathy, and the filmmakers are afraid to go there. They never get inside the heads of the mean girls, which is why The Plastics make for less than formidable adversaries. If Lohan had shown any real malevolence, she might have saved the film as well as stretching her range as an actress. She takes a good whack at it, but her Cady only comes off as snobbish and oblivious at her worst. Evan Rachel Wood could have really given the part the vicious edge it needs. The script is based on a nonfiction book by Rosalind Wiseman about dealing with teens, and the movie reflects too much of its source's grown-up sensibility and self-help ethos. Cady's parents and the school's teachers (who include Fey herself) demonstrate a large degree of understanding. The only satire leveled at adults is through Regina's mom (Amy Poehler), a cosmetic surgery freak who dresses and acts like her daughter's teen-age friends as a way of clinging to her youth. (This bit of caricature is far more potent than the same character that Holly Hunter played in Thirteen.) For all the intelligence that they've put into this thing, the filmmakers never seem to realize the ways in which adult society often reinforces high-school behavior, telling kids that liability is a virtue in and of itself, that the best people are the ones who win popularity contests, and that there's something wrong with the kids who don't fit into a niche. Mean Girls ends with the adults helping the students realize the error of their ways, and even the meanest girls become better people. The movie is a message from grown-ups to kids that says, "Come to us. We've got the answers." That may be the biggest laugh of all.
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