Review: Mean Girls

The film is slim pickings compared to Heathers, but it makes mincemeat out of 13 Going on 30.

Mean Girls
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Two short months after Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Lindsay Lohan returns to movie screens to battle another triumvirate of schoolyard bullies in Mean Girls, directed by Mark S. Waters. Adapted by SNL’s Tina Fey from Rosalind Wiseman’s bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabes, the film casts Lohan as Cady Heron, an Eliza Thornberry who’s essentially transplanted from the African bush to suburban Illinois, and observes what happens to the girl in her new ecosystem. And there’s perhaps no one better equipped than Fey to take on this kind of material, considering her gift for comedy and the fact that she’s also a high school survivor with an obvious ax to grind, for better and for worse.

Because Waters’s images are of the uninspired point-and-shoot variety, it’s very easy to consider Fey the auteur of this project. Fey is genuinely concerned with identity politics, and she understands the caste system that exists in most high schools and how they’re formed. She may be bitter, but that bitterness never clouds her good judgment; however funny the spectacle of an unsupervised tween dancing to Kelis’s “Milkshake” or lifting her top to a Girls Gone Wild video may be, even the worst parent in the world should be able to walk away from Mean Girls recognizing how disturbing this running gag is beneath its absurdist surface.

During the film’s outstanding opening sequence, Fey carefully lays out the topography of Cady’s new high school, likening the process with which she chooses a table in the lunchroom to an animal picking a feeding ground. You could say, then, that Mean Girls is positively Darwinian. Indeed, it’s only natural that when Cady cozies up to the titular “plastics” and discovers their carnivorous behavior, it’s all about the survival of the fittest. And throughout the film, Fey uses Cady’s transformation from new kid on the block to shallow Plastic to illuminate the ways vengeance can make a victim into a so-called mean girl.

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But perhaps some of that high school insecurity is still eating away at Fey, who has a tendency to undervalue her own intelligence, as well as ours. The film’s final moments are lazy, and the nonstop hit-or-miss gags have a way of distracting from the vicious Cady-versus-Plastics death match; it also doesn’t help that Fey calls too much attention to her animal kingdom metaphor. So while Mean Girls may be slim pickings compared to Heathers and Donnie Darko, it still makes mincemeat out of something like 13 Going on 30.

Score: 
 Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Amy Poehler, Ana Gasteyer, Lacey Chabert, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, Jonathan Bennett  Director: Mark S. Waters  Screenwriter: Tina Fey  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2004  Buy: Video, Soundtrack, Book

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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