Mean Girls - 2004 - TV Broadcast

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Tina Fey's Mean Girls really hits home, and not only because it takes place in Chicago--nor because of Tim Meadows' shout-out to the Chi-Town 'hood, when as the principal of a posh North-side school he openly declares in a rioting hallway full of teenagers, "Hell no, I did not leave the South Side for this!" Though all of that helps.

I have both substantial and superficial reasons for loving this film, and in the latter category falls Lindsay Lohan in her sweeter and more full-figured years--the ones before the embarrassing splashes across Us Weekly and sad stints in rehab. Lohan is a lovely actor, and without qualifying that statement further, it's visible in her performance here. Sadly, she's more associated these days with the starlets who aren't famous for much more than sporting Marc Jacobs and Martinis at midnight. But I've got my fingers crossed for a change in that. She's barely twenty-one, so there's plenty of time to pick herself up.

I was also excited about Tim Meadows, the perma-face around the SNL studios for a lot of years. He plays the high school principal, as I mentioned before, and is his usual self, which I think is usually funny. He's single, emasculated, and in love with Tina Fey's character. That's enough for me.

On the more substantive end, Mean Girls is a just a really smart teen movie. Tina Fey wrote the female characters in particular with a lot of heart, and even more snark. The girls' sense of humor keeps them real, like a reality check against the melodramatic inclinations to which they are inevitably prone. A good example is when Cady (Lindsay Lohan), the new girl who's been betrayed by her plasticky pal Regina (Rachel McAdams), imagines Regina's been struck and killed by the school bus. At the moment the two bicker in the middle of a crosswalk the bus hits Regina; cut to Cady, "and that's how Regina died," she says, only to have that dramatic fantasy broken by her comic voice of reality that she is not.

And because Regina doesn't die it means she's got to stick around to resolve her bitchiness with Cady (and the rest of the school.) It proves that the girls are reasonable beings, and that they have the capacity to direct their lives in a progressive manner. I think of Mean Girls as a salute to Clueless, only with far fewer cultural references, and a whole lot more intellect.