Mean Girls: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

Pop culture has taught us plenty about mean girls.

Mean girls are controlling, crafty and insincere. They're sexually promiscuous and duplicitous, vain kittens who use their feminine wiles to reach higher positions of social status while, in the process, striving toward some sort of empty notoriety.

If you examine the Hollywood stereotype, mean girls might have model good looks, but inwardly, they're a wart. They're riddled with such overwhelming insecurities, much of their focus is either on their bodies or on what they wear.

To that end, most mean girls have a compulsive need to shop - some might say relentlessly, compulsively, even professionally - which temporarily distracts them from the truth of who they are while also filling large voids in their lives.

It's just that stereotype that's bolstered in Mark Waters' "Mean Girls," a funny satire peppered with a few savage insights into how cruel teen girls can be to one another. The movie isn't nearly as mean as it could have been - it's no "Election," for instance - but it does make its point that girl fighting can get downright dirty if the opportunities present themselves.

The movie stars Lindsay Lohan as 16-year-old Cady Heron, a nice girl who has been home-schooled her entire life until her family moves from Africa to Illinois.

There at her new high school, she's befriended first by Goth geeks Janis (Lizzy Kaplan) and Damian (Daniel Frazese) before her good looks attract the Plastics, a trio of mean girls led by the vicious Regina (Rachel McAdams).

When Janis and Damian convince Cady to infiltrate the group and get the goods on the girls, she does so blindly yet willingly - and thus unwittingly sets herself up for the seductive pull of popularity, what it takes for some to achieve it and how ugly it can be to maintain it.

The movie was written by Tina Fey of "Saturday Night Live," who also co-stars as Ms. Norbury, a math professor caught in the passive-aggressive cattiness that unfolds when Cady's meddling interferes with the all-important high school hierarchy.

It's Fey's examination of that peculiar caste system that gives "Mean Girls" the layers a lesser film would have lacked. She knows the ridiculous importance that's placed on who sits where in the cafeteria, for instance, and she knows that social suicide in high school can be committed merely by acknowledging the wrong person. Fey sees the humor in that, but she also sees the danger, the absurdity and the pain it can cause.

As such, "Mean Girls," in all its episodic parts, has the air of a memoir, and it likely will feel sufficiently familiar to some of those who watch.

Grade: B