Could the bland poster for Mean Girls be any less indicative of the movie’s potent content? Here’s teenager Lindsay Lohan, relatively unknown to anyone over the age of 18, looking over her shoulder at three human Barbie dolls whose skirts are so short that they threaten to turn a PG-13 image into an NC-17 no-no. It looks like the sort of pandering nonsense that might have starred Freddie Prinze Jr. a couple of years ago, cast opposite some rising Hollywood hottie absurdly chosen to play the school’s social outcast. And didn’t Lohan herself just come out with a film aimed at those too young to vote but too old to lose themselves in Dexter’s Laboratory marathons? It hasn’t even been a full three months since Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen opened — and closed in most markets.
But like Heathers and Clueless, Mean Girls turns out to be the rare teen comedy that refuses to be pigeonholed as merely a teen comedy. Even more remarkably, it also turns out to be the rare Saturday Night Live-sanctioned comedy that’s actually funny. You read that correctly: The fingerprints of various SNL vets are all over this thing, and yet we still laugh at what’s on the screen. It’s a feat worthy of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!
SNL guru Lorne Michaels is prominently plugged as the film’s producer, yet clearly the guiding light behind this project is Tina Fey. The TV show’s “Weekend Update” co-host elected to bring Rosalind Wiseman’s best-selling Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence to the screen, along the way turning a nonfiction book into a fictional screenplay spiced up with her own pithy, piercing observations. Director Mark Waters then came aboard to steer the ship, providing structure but making sure not to get in the way of Fey’s comic zingers.
Lohan stars as Cady Heron, who, after growing up in Africa in true Wild Thornberrys style, has now relocated with her family to a Chicago suburb, set to make her public school debut after a lifetime of home-schooling. A cultural and social blank slate — she thinks “Ashton Kutcher” is a band name — she’s immediately befriended by the school outcasts, punkish Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and “almost too gay to function” Damian (Daniel Franzese). In a sharp expository sequence, Janis and Damian point out all the different cliques while taking Cady on a tour of the school cafeteria, warning her to especially avoid the bitch-goddesses collectively known as The Plastics. But these three — leader Regina (Rachel McAdams) and sycophants Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and Karen (Amanda Seyfried) — are intrigued by this attractive new girl and they quickly assimilate Cady into their privileged circle. At first, she plays along, deriving pleasure from studying these odd specimens from the animal kingdom (the movie frequently presents the high school milieu as an untamed jungle), but before too long, their backstabbing behavior begins to rub off on her. Has Cady herself transformed into one of the Mean Girls?
Besides penning the knowing script, Fey also gave herself a key supporting role as Cady’s divorced math teacher and allowed some of her SNL cohorts to take part in the proceedings. Amy Poehler is outrageously over-the-top as Regina’s shallow mom — the scene involving her rat-dog made me laugh longer and harder than any other sequence in a movie this year — and in a performance that unexpectedly stirred memories of Nipsey Russell, Tim Meadows is marvelous as the school principal, delivering his lines with just the right measure of dusty drollery.
As expected, the movie slows down long enough toward the end to allow its characters to digest important life lessons and deliver lengthy monologues about the insights they’ve gained. Yet even here, Fey takes care to retain her slightly wicked edge, never allowing the movie to slip into ersatz sentimentality.
Incidentally, this is the second picture that director Waters and Lohan have made together; the first was last summer’s enjoyable Freaky Friday remake. Mind you, I’m not quite prepared to elevate the team of Waters-Lohan to the level of Kurosawa-Mifune or Scorsese-De Niro, but they’ve clearly got a good thing going.
Never mind the zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping. The real mystery surrounds the sound of one pair of hands clapping at the conclusion of the comedy Envy.
Last week’s advance screening ended with scores of moviegoers shuffling out as if they had just attended a funeral, but one sole audience member felt the need to applaud. I wasn’t able to track down this patron once the lights went up, so the reason will forever remain impenetrable. Did this person think the movie was good? Did he recently get off his medication and couldn’t control bodily tics and functions? Was he related to someone who worked on the picture? Or was he simply showing his appreciation for the fact that the film was finally over and he could now move on with his life?
I’ll never know the answer, but one thing I’m certain of is that Envy is a steaming pile of celluloid crap. The excrement reference is appropriate, since the plot concerns itself with a loudmouth named Nick (Jack Black) who invents the Vapoorizer, a spray that magically makes dog doo disappear into thin air. His creation turns him into a millionaire, a development that vexes his best friend Tim (Ben Stiller) since the latter had passed on the opportunity to invest in the venture when it was still in the planning stages. Now torn apart by jealousy, Tim foolishly takes guidance from the J-Man (Christopher Walken), a drifter whose suggestions invariably backfire and make matters worse.
Barry Levinson, an accomplished Oscar-winning director whose bombs are now starting to outnumber his hits, can do absolutely nothing with newcomer Steve Adams’ perfectly dreadful script. Initially, the movie tries its hand at black comedy, but there’s no edge to any of the scenes. Then it tries to mimic the Farrellys by tossing a dead horse into the proceedings (don’t ask), but this subplot goes on forever and yields a minimal return on its investment. Finally, everybody simply seems to run out of ideas, and the picture limps its way toward a conclusion that’s even more poorly realized than everything that had preceded it.
It really says something when a movie manages to snag the services of both Ben Stiller and Jack Black and then squanders their considerable talents by forcing them to play unlikable, uninteresting characters who come across as irritating rather than amusing. The sooner they Vapoorize this movie from their resumes, the better off we’ll all be.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2004.
