Mean Girls

Mean girls fits into the genre of adolescent angst films like a glove. But don’t be mistaken, the film is much more cleverly written than your standard teenage fare. Credit Tina Fey the head writer for Saturday Night Live for the writing, a blend of traditional stereotype jokes and subtle cutting humor. The teen film usually deals with high school cliques and attempts to cross those boundaries. O course, this being a movie, the cliques are more blatant and the characters more stereotypical than those you may remember in high school. At times this film reminded me of Clueless, Can’t Hardly Wait, and Can’t Buy Me Love, certainly not the bottom of the barrel when it comes to teen movies.

Lindsay Lohan made a big splash in Freaky Friday and here she is playing without the safety net of a big name star. She performs admirably bringing both warmth and cruelty, and most importantly, a sense of conscience, into the film. Here she is Cady, a well adjusted 16 year old girl who was homeschooled by her parents in Africa. The story follows her daily sojurn through high school as she is suddenly submersed in the politics and backstabbing of the typical American high school. Here she survives such things as lunchroom geography, three way calling sneak attacks, and boy baiting.

Cady starts school and by the second day she has befriended two alternative types and been invited by ‘the plastics’ to sit with them at lunch. If only making friends at a new school were so easy. In Mean Girls Tina Fey gives a new twist on the story of pretending to be what you are not by having a nice new girl invade the cool girls ‘the plastics’ on behalf of her first friends who would be considered ‘alternative’. Her new friends convince her to spy on the popular girls to find out some dirt and to sabotage their popularity. They also point out that joining Mathletes is social suicide and draw her a map of the cafeteria clique minefield. Cady thinks both of her groups of new friends are nice until she confides to Regina, the head of ‘the plastics’, that she has a crush on a boy only to see Regina steal him from her.

All of this lead to Cady and her two cohorts declaring war on the plastics. They plan their attack and then proceed to make Regina fat by plying her with Swedish weight gain bars, breakup her relationship with her boyfriend, and alienate her from her friends. The film has all of the basic elements necessary to a teenage movie, a love story, a party when the parents are away, and a prom.

This film deals with some important girl themes, like why do we feel so betrayed when someone says something mean behind our backs when nearly every girl does it to someone else? It also deals with the all too prevalent issue of dumbing down, here Cady starts to fail math so her love interest will tutor her. She does so well at this that she starts to fail her best class. Here the screen writers tread a fine path but they seem to do it well. Cady doesn’t get the guy this way and she is forced to admit that she is good at math and even to join the Mathletes as a form of punishment. Punishment indeed for most of us, but something Cady is able to shine at.

The style of the film is pretty straight forward as is the less than inspired directing. In most the adults are given nothing to do. Since most of the adults here are Saturday Night Live alum they do more than many though they still serve as on joke background material. Tina Fey wrote herself quite a nice part as Cady’s math teacher and the woman whose life is in shambles but leads a self-esteem seminar to show the girls what it is that they do to themselves and to each other. Not Academy material, but it helps to raise the film from a mediocre teen flick to an above average summer teen movie with a strong message to girls to be themselves and not be afraid to show their individuality.

A fun light movie with the eternal theme of why can’t we just all be ourselves and get along. Of course this is a movie directed at girls, but it has a good message that gets through and is not so insipid that an adult can’t sit through it. All parties should be well satisfied with a movie that dares to dream that high school can be about more than fitting in.