Review: Mean Girls (2004)

Mean Girls (2004)

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, language and some teen partying

Score: 5 out of 5

Mean Girls has often been called the Heathers of its generation, the teen movie that helped to define and incisively satirize what being a teenager (especially a teenage girl) meant around the time it came out. That is undoubtedly true, but a case can also be made that it is the Groundhog Day of its generation. Not in terms of story or themes, but in how it built its reputation over the years. When it first came out in 2004, the general opinion was that it was a very good film, but not a great one. It topped the box office and made plenty of money, but it wasn't a blockbuster. Lindsay Lohan was praised for her performance, but it was thought that this was just a stepping stone in her career. (Oh, how wrong we were...) Tina Fey was praised for her script, but it was seen as just another funny screenplay written by a Saturday Night Live alum. By all appearances, this was a film that would wind up like She's All That, Can't Hardly Wait, or the later Easy A, a movie that teenagers at the time enjoyed and would go on to have nostalgic "hey, remember that movie?" memories of, but not an out-and-out classic. Well, here we are fourteen years later. Last night, I took my brother and his girlfriend to a screening of this film at the Coral Gables Art Cinema playing to a packed house, composed of equal parts twentysomethings who were teenagers when this came out (us included) and teenagers who were in diapers at the time of its original release, one that ended with a drag queen doing a performance as the film's catty villain. The crowd was able to quote what seemed like half the lines in the film, at least some of which they likely knew as much from their repetition as internet memes as from the film itself. While Lohan's career and personal life turned into a notorious cautionary tale, numerous other actors from the film went on to become stars themselves -- and yet Mean Girls is still remembered as a high point in all their filmographies. Last year, it was adapted into a Broadway musical co-written by Fey herself that, as of this writing, has been nominated for twelve Tony awards. Before the 2000s were even through, a general consensus had emerged that Mean Girls was one of the greatest comedies of the decade.

And who am I to challenge that consensus? It's not wrong. Watching it again, I still laughed my ass off from start to finish at this film's excellent sense of humor, got invested in the protagonist's journey and transformation into the very thing she was trying to destroy, felt the punch to the gut once the full stakes of the story hit home, smiled at the ending, and followed all the most famous quotes. This isn't just an incredibly funny movie, packed so thick with one-liners and hilarious scenes that barely a moment goes by when I'm not laughing, but it's also a blazingly on-point deconstruction of the amount of damage that the seemingly harmless "kids will be kids" bullying between teenagers can do, a lesson that, in the internet age, we seem to need more than ever -- and it manages to walk the fine line between the two without turning overly serious or flippant in the third act. Mean Girls is, to quote another online film critic, Bob Chipman, really that good.

The plot starts with Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), the 16-year-old daughter of zoologist parents who had raised and homeschooled her in Africa her entire life. Now, they are settling down back home in suburban Illinois, and hope to send their daughter to a real school so that she can learn how to socialize. At her new school, Cady runs into and befriends two groups of people: the outcasts Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), who sit at the edge of the cafeteria, and the Plastics, the school's elite girl clique who proudly sit at the center of it. Led by the queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams) and composed further of her #2 toady Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) and the airheaded Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), the Plastics are equal parts beloved and feared by their classmates for their beauty, their fashion sense, and Regina's ability to destroy the life of anybody around her. After Regina steals the heart of Aaron Samuels, a guy who Cady was interested in, she plots with Janis and Damian (the former herself an ex-Plastic whose social standing was ruined when Regina spread rumors about her sexuality) to use her closeness to Regina to do unto her what she did unto so many other girls in the school. However, their plot soon spirals out of control as it becomes apparent, to everybody except Cady, that, with Regina falling from her perch as the school's queen, Cady is now taking her spot and turning into exactly the sort of person that she had tried to get rid of in the first place.

The beauty of the film is that it is told largely from Cady's blinkered perspective, such that the audience is kept willfully blind to just how bad her behavior is getting even though, if we were to be put into a more objective position, we would readily see that Cady is turning into a mean girl no different from Regina. Her clothing gets sexier and more fashionable, she grows distant from Janis and Damian, she hosts wild parties at her house, and she increasingly takes the lead in finding new ways to ruin Regina's life -- and yet, in her voiceover throughout the film, she always makes excuses for her behavior until the moment arrives when it all comes crashing down. The fact that I was able to buy into all of these excuses before then is a testament to both the quality of Fey's writing and that of Lindsay Lohan's performance as Cady. Between them, we get a portrait of a girl who starts the film as a goody-goody, academically-inclined scientists' daughter, and slowly transforms into the portrait of a cruel, self-centered asshole, all while still thinking herself to be the girl she used to be without ever realizing just what sort of person she has actually turned into. The message is clear: mean girls aren't just rich kids who live in nice mansions and drive hot cars, but they live inside all of us. The fact that this film was based on a non-fiction advice book, Queen Bees and Wannabes by sociologist Rosalind Wiseman, is telling here; a key point that Wiseman made in her book is that, looking back as an adult, she herself engaged in this sort of behavior when she was a teenage girl, only now realizing it. Flip the genders, and you could easily have a film about put-upon nerds trying to take down the jocks, only for them to turn into the same sort of bullies themselves along the way. (And looking at the trajectory of geek culture in the last ten years, I'm surprised nobody's already made that film.) I find it rather ironic, then, that this film's most immediate pop culture legacy was to spawn a litany of YA novels and teen dramas in which figures like Regina and Cady were celebrated as unequivocal protagonists, as this film is a feature-length dismantling of the mindset and cycle of bullying that turns normal kids into callous brats.

The fact that the film is able to successfully thread the needle between its message and its humor, even when the message takes center stage during the climax, speaks volumes as to the deft comic timing of both Fey and director Mark Waters. The manner in which Mean Girls is absolutely stuffed with jokes, fitted in everywhere they possibly could, calls to mind the glory days of Mel Brooks and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team who sought to have something funny happening in virtually every scene. If there is an excuse to throw in a comedic line or a comedic delivery of a line, then Fey and Waters exploited it to the fullest. It is for this reason that so much of this film's dialogue is so readily quotable, even by people who were just toddlers back in 2004; it just does not let up. And yet, the constant humor never makes the characters seem any less interesting, or their journeys feel any less important. This is a very hard line to walk for somebody writing a mainstream comedy film. On one hand, too much focus on the jokes can pull the stakes out of a story and make it feel like lightweight fluff (a common criticism of Marvel movies), while on the other, if you put too much emphasis on the story, then the humor can suffer, especially late in the film when it comes time to wrap everything up (a common criticism of Judd Apatow). Mean Girls, however, nailed the sweet spot, and it's largely because of the characters. Even when delivering funny lines, the characters don't feel like they're saying them just to make the audience laugh. When Regina, for instance, makes a fake call as "Susan from Planned Parenthood" to a girl's mother in order to ruin her life, it's the moment that establishes just how evil she can be. When Principal Duvall says, during the climax, that he didn't leave the South Side of Chicago to have to put up with this crap from rich teenage girls, it shows his genuine frustration with the out-of-control bullying his students engage in, comparing it directly to ghetto stereotypes. When Gretchen turns an essay on the assassination of Julius Caesar into a thinly-veiled rant about her frustrations with being Regina's underling, Cady herself says it: she's finally snapped. When Damian demands his pink shirt back, it's because he feels genuinely betrayed by Cady.

And it wouldn't have worked without the actors involved. Really, watching this now, it's no surprise how much of the cast went on to become famous afterwards, and why Lohan was seen as having so much promise (hence why her downward spiral stung so hard). Lizzy Caplan not only does a great job of being virtually unrecognizable from her later persona as Janis, she also does a great job playing a character whose "alternative" image is strongly implied to be a pose, as hinted by her past friendship with Regina and her skill at dismantling the mean girl's life (complete with a dose of slut-shaming). Daniel Franzese serves up plenty of hilarious comic relief and some of the funniest lines in the film as Janis' flamboyant partner-in-crime Damian. Lacey Chabert's Gretchen and Amanda Seyfried's Karen seem like a one-dimensional yes-woman and dumb blonde on the surface, but the film, and their performances, take those characters and explore their many layers. Fey herself plays the math teacher Miss Norbury as the voice of the film's morality, laying out the story's message at the end in between scenes where she talks about being a "pusher" (a choice of words that comes back to haunt her) and winds up in a wet tank top in front of her class. Even minor characters, like the sex-hating coach/health teacher, the principal, the "cool Asian" girl, the main characters' various parents, and the head of the mathletes who thinks he's also a badass MC, all feel like actual people, recurring throughout the film, getting a bit of development every time they show up, and being played by a who's who of talented 2000s comedic actors (including many of Fey's SNL co-stars) like Ana Gasteyer, Neil Flynn, Amy Poehler, and Tim Meadows. It felt like there were hundreds of different stories going on in this school and that we were just seeing one of them, not like it was a place where everything revolved around a small group of kids. Above all, however, there's one performance that it's impossible to not talk about in this film, and that is Rachel McAdams as Regina George. Perhaps the best portrayal of this sort of "popular girl" villain ever, McAdams plays Regina as a girl who is drop-dead gorgeous, knows it, and is willing to do anything to remain on top of the school's heap. She knows that, to actually be this sort of mean popular girl without burning so many bridges that everybody hates you (thus ruining the "popular" part), she has to pretend to be nice, and until we see what she's really capable of later in the film, she actually does seem pretty nice despite being the image of many of the bad memories that most adult women, and some men, have from high school. When it comes to teen movie villains, there are few better than McAdams as Regina, especially as her downfall later in the film drives her to a total breakdown and outrageous extremes in the name of revenge.

The Bottom Line

Mean Girls holds up better than ever even after being quoted to death for the last fourteen years, sitting proudly next to Heathers, The Breakfast Club, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High as one of the greatest teen movies ever made. If you've seen it before, then you know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't, fix that, because it is so... damn it, I really wanted to go this review without quoting it...

...it's so fetch.