“Mean Girls” aspires to be a farcically cautionary update on the tribal rites of the suburban American high school, starring Lindsay Lohan, whose public may or may not be ready to humor her promotion to a PG-13 sort of comic idiom.
Miss Lohan plays Cady Heron, a bright and attractive high school junior. An only child tutored by her parents (zoologists absorbed in African travel and research), she is tossed abruptly into a social crucible called North Shore High, supposedly located in Evanston, Ill.
Despite the flattering introduction, these parents (Ana Gasteyer and Neil Flynn) are kept cluelessly preoccupied while Cady is torn between rival factions at North Shore. Adopted by a glamour-puss clique of three known as the Plastics, she operates as something of a double agent until briefly seduced by the dark side of shallowness.
This susceptibility culminates in a flurry of drastic mishaps and mass therapeutic apologetics that have the curious effect of trivializing every conflict the filmmakers have been pretending to incite and mock since the fade-in.
Screenwriter Tina Fey and director Mark Waters are torn between superior prototypes in the high school comedy genre. It’s easy to detect a tug of war between the essentially sympathetic and optimistic school — exemplified by John Hughes’ vehicles for Molly Ringwald (“Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink”) and Amy Heckerling’s “Clueless,” an inspired Beverly Hills update of Jane Austen’s “Emma” — and the cutthroat school, a type still dominated by “Heathers” and “Scream.”
In addition, there’s another franchise that needs tending. The movie was produced by Lorne Michaels, the long-running impresario of “Saturday Night Live.” Miss Fey, cast as an acerbic math teacher named Ms. Norbury, remains a fixture of the “SNL” ensemble. Her colleagues have included Miss Gasteyer; Tim Meadows, who plays mild-mannered principal Mr. Duvall; and Amy Poehler, a conspicuous grotesque as Mrs. George, the permissive mother of Rachel McAdams’ Regina, the unscrupulous ringleader of the Plastics.
To her credit, Miss Fey juggles the teenage and adult constituencies with some facility while trifling with a pop sociological treatise of doubtful comic potential. Mr. Waters, who also directed the recent Lindsay Lohan hit “Freaky Friday,” has acquired a sometimes crackerjack sense of slapstick timing, evident when the heroine walks in unexpectedly on friends absorbed in a horror-film telecast and when she takes a header into a giant trash can.
The glaring conceptual weakness is that the movie seems to end up acknowledging that it has been much ado about nothing. “Pretty in Pink and “Heathers” remained sounder dramatically by taking some conflicts seriously. Not every adolescent enmity could be glossed over or patched up. “Clueless” also was sounder structurally because the protagonist herself was a teenage queen bee who required a comeuppance — and was sensitive enough to recognize the justice of the humbling process.
Cady’s recruitment to the mean girls is never particularly persuasive. Twisting her in and out of their influence seems to generate a lot of self-defeating torque. While outsnobbing a dinky circle of snobs, the filmmakers underline the wasted motion by concluding that everyone will soon grow out of mean-spirited insecurity anyway.
Miss Lohan has begun to resemble the emergent Ann-Margret physically while retaining a fundamentally winning rather than mercenary personality. She doesn’t seem avid to hog the limelight. It’s one of the reasons the camera seems drawn to her as an emotional touchstone. It remains to be seen where this mixture of voluptuous and radiant comic potential will lead, but “Mean Girls” looks commercially surefire.
**
TITLE: “Mean Girls”
RATING: PG-13 (Occasional profanity and sexual vulgarity within a high school setting; elements of morbid humor)
CREDITS: Directed by Mark Waters. Produced by Lorne Michaels. Screenplay by Tina Fey, based on the book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman. Cinematography by Daryn Okada. Production design by Cary White. Costume design by Mary Jane Fort. Music by Rolfe Kent.
RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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