Mean Girls
"Mean Girls" is a pitcher of Kool-Aid with a drop of acid, which are the opposite proportions of the beverage you'd expect from its writer, Tina Fey, whose barbs as coanchor of "Weekend Update" are a highlight of "Saturday Night Live."
Loosely based on "Queen Bees & Wannabes," Rosalind Wiseman's pop sociology book of conversations with young girls, the movie's bile toward catty, petty, back-stabbing behavior dissolves inside this ultimately sugary soft drink of a movie. The message is, "Ladies, why can't we all get along?"
"Mean Girls" stars Lindsay Lohan who, if you believe the gossip, has been locked for months in a nasty catfight with fellow teen icon Hilary Duff. Lohan was insufferably bratty in her last movie, "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen." Here, she acquits herself well, mixing meekness and cunning as Cady, an intelligent 17-year-old unfamiliar with the caste system of the American high school.
Cady and her family used to live in Africa, where she was home-schooled, until they moved to Illinois. Her new school's two art geek outcasts -- a punk-goth (and rumored lesbian) named Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), a fat gay guy -- take Cady into their care, telling her whom to avoid: namely the popular girls -- three rich, allegedly stylish, image-obsessed ditzes named Regina, Karen, and Gretchen (Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, and Lacey Chabert) with interchangeably low IQs who are referred to as the Plastics.
Cady winds up sucked into their clique anyway, and learns the languages of the American teen, including the girl-to-girl dialect of double-speak. The Plastics seem fascinated with Cady's passion for school and ignorance of American popular culture. "You're like a Martian," Regina, the Alpha Plastic, says.
Cady becomes an experiment for them. The experiment goes both ways though: Janis proposes that Cady pretend to be one of the Plastics so she can report back to Janis and Damian what the girls say about them. Naturally, membership in this exclusive club has more privileges than does membership in the excluded one. Cady is taken to Regina's McMansion, meets her vain mother (Amy Poehler), and gets a glimpse of the big pink scrapbook whose pages the Plastics devote to people they can't stand. Eventually, Cady includes one page for her ordinary math teacher (whom Fey plays).
Only when a boy is involved do things between Cady (people pronounce her name "catty") and the Plastics go south. He's a harmless kid named Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), who remains off limits to most girls because he used to date Regina until she broke up with him. After Gretchen lets it slip that Cady likes Aaron, Regina takes him back. But Cady is already smitten, failing math quizzes so she can ask dim Aaron for help. When she finds out that Regina's been cheating on him, she connives to bust her and break up the Plastics.
"Mean Girls," which Mark Waters directs with zip, constructs a youth culture with few demilitarized zones. The movie is always entertaining and frequently smart about the new ground one girl will break to humiliate another. At one point, Cady gets Regina addicted to the snack bars athletes use to bulk up, turning her into a carboholic. Then there's the three-way-call attack, in which one caller asks another incriminating questions about a third person listening quietly on the line. It's the passive-aggressive equivalent of any death grip in any martial arts movie.
Fey clearly intends "Mean Girls" as a rebuke to the way girls cannibalize each other -- over men, among other things -- and perhaps to the movies that showcase such relentlessness, starting with 1989's vicious "Heathers," which Waters's brother Daniel wrote.
Late in "Mean Girls," the contents of that big pink book are made public, enraging every girl in school and instigating the biggest filmed catfight this side of a women's prison film. Fey's character is asked to bring reconciliation and restore goodness. It's great that the movie wants to stop the cycle of hate among teenage females, but, like a Band-Aid on a deep wound, "Mean Girls" seems inadequately equipped to stem the damage. If there's a problem with the movie, it's that the healing rarely feels as good or is as convincing as the hurting.
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