Most movies that do not have an original script are adapted from novels—Mean Girls is an unusal variant to the normal model, and it pays off. Tina Frey used to act and write for Saturday Night Live (SNL). She is well grounded in existential humour. Mark Waters’s direction has also helped.
The link to Africa is an odd one. Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan, whom we saw recently in Freaky Friday and White Oleander) is a 15-year-old who has been raised in the bush in Africa where both her parents (acted by Ana Gasteyer and Neil Flynn) worked as zoologists. They are loving and well meaning, but also lack knowledge of what is required to survive in America. Because Cady has been “home-schooled” she has not had the normal years of socialisation most American youth endure.
On returning to suburban Chicago she is enrolled in a school, which, if not a “blackboard jungle”, is still divided into various student sub-cultures. Because Cady is essentially an outsider, even if a beautiful one, she can observe and comment on the intricacies of teenage life. Mean Girls is an entertaining sociological study of student sub-cultures in an American school.
On her first day at school Cady makes friends with two misfits, Damian, a sharp gay male and an odd-one out female named Janis Ian played by Daniel Franzese and Lizzy Caplan. They set Cady up to infiltrate the Plastics, wanting to spy on this girls’ society led by Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried).
Cady survives her initiation and is let in, only to find herself corrupted by the headiness of it all. When Cady confesses an attraction to Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), whom Regina thinks she owns, Cady is warned that she’ll suffer the consequences if she lets go of herself. Cady is told, “That’s, like, the rule of Feminism”.
A number of other SNL actors are here, including Amy Poehler as Mrs. George, Regina’s mother, who wishes she were a teenager too and Tim Meadows as the school head, Mr. Duvall. Tina Fey directs her satirical wit at everyone.
Though the film, as in many comedies, is episodic, held together by a thin thread, it achieves a whole that is enjoyable. It is a good satire of privilege and its role in schools—making you realise why schools elsewhere in the world keep to uniforms.
The feel-good ending is a bit artificial. The mathematics teacher, Ms. Norbury (Tina Fey) calls all the girls in the school to a meeting in the gym and persuades them to seek to transform their lives—would that such a teen-age utopia was really possible. But it still is fun to fantasize.
Mean Girls is one hour and 37 minutes long. It is rated 13 (PG) for language, sex and making whoopee. Tina Fey wrote the script and Mark Waters directed it, he also directed Freak Friday. It is based on the non-fiction parental guide by Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence. The cinematographer was Daryn Okada, while Wendy Greene Bricmont edited it, and the music is by Rolfe Kent.
