|
MEAN
GIRLS
6/10
USA
2004 : Mark S WATERS : 97 mins
Director Waters'
Freaky Friday remake
was one of the more unlikely critical and commercial hits of last summer,
showcasing a resurgent Jamie Lee Curtis as the mother who accidentally
body-swaps with her teenage daughter. But the film wouldn't have worked
if the actress playing the daughter (arguably the tricker role, essayed
by Jodie Foster in the 1976 version) hadn't been up to scratch. And the
relatively-unknown Lindsay Lohan certainly didn't let anyone down. She
now reteams with Waters for Mean Girls: and box-office returns
of over $80m on a reported $17m budget have firmly cemented her status
as the reigning "screen teen queen."
Her character
Cady Heron isn't your average high-schooler: educated at home in Africa
by her American parents until the age of 17, Cady faces a severe culture
shock when she's enrolled at Illinois' North Shore High. The fish-out-of-water
is quickly befriended by another pair of misfits, feisty art-student Janis
(Lizzy Caplan) and the hefty-but-flamboyant Damien (Daniel Franzese),
who is, in Janis's phrase, "almost too gay to function."
Janis and Damien see in Cady their chance to obtain revenge on the trio
of hyper-glamorous, supremely 'mean' babes they derisively dub "the
Plastics." Under instruction from Janis and Damien, Cady becomes
pally the Plastics: airhead Karen (Amanda Seyfried), gossip-monger Gretchen
(Lacey Chabert) and the Queen Bee, Regina (Rachel McAdams). But it isn't
long before Caddy realises she may have bitten off more than she can chew...
Mean Girls
has a slightly odd pedigree for a mainstream Hollywood feature: the
screenplay (by Saturday Night Live bigwig Tina Fey) is officially
"based on" Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes,
a well-regarded
non-fiction manual for parents subtitled Helping Your Daughter Survive
Cliques Gossip
Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence. "Inspired by"
would be closer to the mark - Fey and Waters' film is a relatively conventional
(and predictable) high-school comedy, with snappy dialogue, believable
characterisations and (mostly) decent gags to counteract the somewhat
'functional' direction.
There are
some distinct low-spots, such as the two (mercifully brief) interludes
in which Cady, flashing back to her African upbringing, imagines her fellow
students acting like jungle creatures - basically an excuse for the actors
to indulge in some of the "I'm a tiger! Raaaaar!" role-play
familiar from the first weeks of any drama school. Equally ill-advised
is a somewhat tasteless running-gag in which characters are (or appear
to be) knocked over by school buses, Final
Destination-style. And Cady doesn't half sound like a born-and-bred
Yank for a girl supposedly brought up among native-Africans in the veldt.
But Lohan
is sufficiently believable and appealing to cancel out these negatives.
And while there's no Curtis around to kick things up to the next level,
the star does get to play several key scenes opposite several talented
older performers: while Lohan was Cady's age during filming, Chabert
and Caplin were 21, Franzese 25 and the youthful-looking McAdams a barely-believable
26. Aren't teenagers allowed to play teenagers any more?
15th June,
2004
(seen 14th June : Odeon, Newcastle-upon-Tyne : press show)
by Neil
Young
-
|
