Viking Night: Mean Girls
By Bruce Hall
November 15, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Freaky Friday is somewhat amusing, but certainly not Viking Night material. But now I had Lohan on the brain, so surely there was something Li-Lo related I could slip in at the last minute?
The Parent Trap was right out, because as much as I love Dennis Quaid, he never manages to be in anything I want to see. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen simply wasn’t going to happen tonight. That’s precisely the kind of Disney film I try to avoid. And I believe Lindsay once starred on screen with a Volkswagen, but to acknowledge that would be to concede that for the longest time, before my age reached double digits, my favorite movie was The Love Bug.
Let us speak no more of that.
But hey, look - Mean Girls! I usually can’t stand Rachel McAdams, but for the longest time I thought she was Jennifer Garner in this, so that’s perfect! Also, Amanda Seyfried made her big screen debut! America’s Big Sister Tina Fey wrote the screenplay! Is Lizzy Caplan underrated because Hollywood hates brunettes? You decide! Remember Lacey Chabert from Party of Five? No? That’s okay, because who doesn’t love them some Amy Poehler?
And as long as executive producer Lorne Michaels is alive, I assume Tim Meadows and Ana Gasteyer will always have a place to crash.
But the real star is Fey’s screenplay, and not just because that kind of rhymes. Mean Girls is a high school “dramedy” in the vein of, well, every defining film of the genre. This is a stylized version of high school where kids are without question mean to each other. But it’s in that slightly self aware, mildly homogenized manner that only vaguely resembles the random acts of brutality that take place in an actual high school. Imagine “Easy A” with just a dusting of “Sixteen Candles” crossed with “Heathers,” minus all the gruesome homicide.
Throw in Tina Fey’s trademark self-deprecating wit and no joke, you’ve got yourself an all time-classic.
Mean Girls starts out as a fish out of water story, with 16-year-old Cady Heron (Lohan) having spent most of her life on the African savanna with her nerdy scientist parents. Because reasons, the Herons move back to the United States, where Cady is enrolled at the kind of high school that only exists in an Amy Heckerling movie (or upper middle class suburbs like the one where I grew up). North Shore High boasts a visually diverse student body from a variety of apparent backgrounds, who all mostly sound like the same person.
The most notable exception is the Plastics, a trio of imperious social succubi consisting of mildly ditzy Karen (Seyfried), acutely vapid Gretchen (Chabert), and reigning Bitch Queen Regina George (McAdams). The Plastics rule the school, as it is said, in a way reminiscent of that one movie where Christian Slater and Winona Ryder tried to murder all their classmates.
The second most notable exception is Goth Girl Janis (Kaplan) and her openly gay best friend Damien (Daniel Franzese). As self described outcasts, they take an immediate shine to Cady when they observe the rest of the class openly shunning her. For her part Cady is an honest, friendly, responsible girl who always follows the rules and loves math “because it’s the same in every country.” I’m fairly certain those qualities didn’t win you any more friends in 2004 than they did when I was in school.
Janis and Damien take Cady under their tutelage, and manage to suitably prepare her for the day when Regina unexpectedly takes an interest in the naive newcomer. Unfortunately Janis has a very personal beef with Regina, and attempts to enlist Cady in her plans for revenge. But at the same time, Cady is nursing a crush on Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron (Jonathan Bennett, whose crow’s feet make him look like the world’s oldest 11th grader), and the Bitch Queen is none too happy about it when she finds out.
In retaliation, Regina attempts to ensnare poor Cady in an emotionally bottomless scheme of her own. Things don’t go quite as planned. Hilarity ensues, along with the learning of Valuable Life Lessons.
Does that sound like high school? As I recall, when boys that age had a disagreement, they simply met by the flagpole after school and punched each other in the face until one of them fell over. Meanwhile, I seem to recall girls who got that angry often getting supremely horrible. With it being unseemly to fistfight, the Fairer Sex might choose to play devastating mind games with one another instead. I’ve been punched in the face, and I’ve witnessed a Three-Way Calling attack firsthand. I can tell you which one hurt the recipient more.
That is some next level tactical bullshit, right there.
I’m going on a limb to say that Tina Fey was probably on the receiving end of some of that, and as always, it informs her wit. Mean Girls has a little fun with itself and flips the script a bit about halfway through. That’s not to say it doesn’t end up more or less where you think it will, but let’s just say that the journey there resonates a bit better than it usually does in a film of this type. It’s funny, clever, charming, heartwarming, nostalgic, and ever so slightly politically incorrect that I’m not sure you could remake it as-is today.
Not that the film does anything wrong. We just live in a time where rather than become a cult favorite, all the wonderful things about Mean Girls might have been boycotted of existence over the word “retard” being uttered eleven minutes in. Of greater concern to me is how the ending of the film nearly overreaches in order to make its point, but come on. At the end of the day you’d have to be some sort of monster not to come away from Mean Girls anything less than “mildly beguiled”, if not “charmed” or straight-up “delighted” by the experience.
This being my third viewing, I’m happy to say that Mean Girls retains its place in the Viking Night Top 25 with no change in position. My only real regret remains the fact that a Mean Girls vs. Heathers crossover comic still does not exist.
Guess I’d better learn to draw.