Viking Night:
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion
By Bruce Hall
February 2, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
So if you’re like me, the year you graduated, you were pretty sure you’d somehow become a millionaire. The plan was, you’d show up at your 10 year reunion in a fully functional replica of the Batmobile, flanked by a pair of Victoria’s Secret models. You won’t stay long, of course, because you’d be running late for a party at Troy Aikman’s house. But you’d stay just long enough for all the girls who ever turned you down to meet Svetlana and Genevieve. And all the jocks who once tormented you would come to understand that yes, the Batmobile DOES have an ejection seat.
Reality would intervene six months before the reunion, when you’d finally come to realize that part-time secondary assistant shift manager at Circuit City was just an extended synonym for “failure.” Plus, you would no doubt come to learn just how prohibitive Batmobile rentals really are.
This is basically the plot of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. Except that the Batmobile is a Jaguar. And instead of a raunchy male bonding comedy, this is the lighthearted story of two girls who could be Bill and Ted’s slightly older, equally dopey cousins - just an hour down the road from San Dimas. I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but it’s kind of refreshing to watch a female oriented “buddy” flick that is not primarily a romantic comedy. Yes, there’s romance IN it, but it’s not exactly the point of the film.
The point of the film, as far as I can tell, is that you should look to the future, not the past. That your self-esteem should be derived from your own sense of personal pride, and not what others think of you. And also that lifelong dreams and ambitions can be realistically achieved over the course of one night, in a room full of people you haven’t seen in 10 years, and will probably never see again afterward.
Plus, unlike most “guy” movies, being a failure never looked so good. Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) are BFFs who are still living together 10 years on from high school. Their lives are ostensibly not going well, but you'd never know it by looking. If this were a Vince Vaughn film, there would be vomit and squalor and fast food involved. But even though Romy works the service desk at a Jaguar dealer, and Michele seems unfamiliar with the concept of employment in general, they manage to scratch out a living the way you can only in the movies.
The girls live in a cavernous apartment overlooking Venice Beach that looks like the love child of an Ethan Allen and IKEA. By day the girls sit around watching TV, eating candy and giggling. At night they hit the clubs and stage elaborately choreographed dance numbers wearing colorful clothes of their own design. Romy only shows her face at work when the plot specifically calls for it. I don’t know where they get their money, but they’re both a hell of a lot better off than I am. Unfortunately, their decade of carefree revelry is interrupted when a former classmate pops by the Jaguar dealership to pick up her car. Heather Mooney (Janeane Garofalo) is still the same Gothy, acerbic person she was in high school, but she’s made a fortune in the cigarette business. And, apparently, she still holds Michele responsible for stealing the attention of longtime crush Sandy Frink (Alan Cumming), who has also gone on to great success.
Suddenly, Romy and Michele are confronted with the possibility that their super cool, responsibility free lives might not look so awesome in comparison to their old classmates. So, after a week or so of trying to lose weight, find boyfriends, and land super impressive high paying jobs, they decide to go with Plan B. Michele will make them a pair of badass business suits, Romy will snag a Jaguar from the dealership, and they’ll just PRETEND to be successful. They concoct a ridiculous backstory about how the two of them invented Post-It Notes, and off then they’re off to the reunion. What could go wrong?
Obviously, everything does, and that’s the funny part. Screenwriter Robin Schiff has a long history of producing female- and relationship-oriented fare, and this story in particular is inspired by her popular stage play Ladies Room, which also starred Kudrow. This helps a lot, because it allowed Kudrow to refine Michele’s tepid, post Valley Girl personality into a veritable art form. Most of us who are old enough have wrestled with the same fears regarding our class reunion, and somewhere out there is an idiot who really did show up at his reunion in a rented Ferrari, pretending to be Richard Branson’s silent business partner.
Yet despite their immense stupidity, Romy and Michele are so adorably vapid that you can’t hate them. Similarly, while this movie easily could have been just 90 minutes of fart jokes and pratfalls, it’s not. This is a film with genuine heart, and much more of it than you’d expect going in. So while there’s obviously nothing remotely realistic about the story, it successfully connects with the inherent desire most people have to be liked and respected by our peers. And since we tend to divide ourselves into social cliques long after grade school ends, there’s an emotional component here we can all relate to regardless of age.
None of it would work without a great cast, and a great script for them to work with. The writing is crisp, the jokes tend to rely on subtle timing and improvisation, and almost everyone involved is more than up to the task. If you don’t think Garofalo is a good actor, watch the moment she asks Alan Cumming to dance and he says “It’s no fun unless you really love the person.” To paraphrase Bart Simpson, you can literally see the moment when her soul is snuffed out. Everyone is great but perhaps none more so than Julia Campbell, who plays the Head Bitch in a Heathers-esque group of popular girls who spent high school making everyone’s lives miserable. She is, in a word, sublime. I really doubt David Mirkin is that gifted a director, so I’m putting this on the casting director. Well done. Well done, indeed.
But the core of the film remains Romy and Michele’s relationship, and the strength of their friendship. They’ve always got each other’s backs. They are - for the most part - relentlessly (almost foolishly) optimistic, and their worldview is so innocently naive it’s impossible not to love them. They’re kind of like a Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie that you DON’T want to stab. This is easily one of my favorite comedies of the 1990s, and not only am I astonished it doesn’t get more love than it does, I can’t believe there was never a sequel (the horrible TV adaptation with Katherine Heigl does not count). If you haven’t seen Romy and Michele, stop what you’re doing and rectify that. If you have, do the same. Trust me. It’s been too long.