Fey’s math teacher is washed-up, recently divorced, and constantly amused by the temptation to be bitter and ironic in front of children who do not comprehend her. One gets the feeling that she went to school here. We never quite see into the head of Rachel McAdams, The Plastic queen bee, whose performance, according to the DVD commentary, is based on Alec Baldwin’s in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” But we do see into Cady’s when she ascends the throne and we can speculate on the similarities.
Don’t let the name of “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels in the credits frighten you, even if he is responsible for “It’s Pat! The Movie,” “A Night at the Roxbury,” and “Superstar.” “Mean Girls” is not an “SNL” sketch stretched beyond its breaking point into a 84 minute “feature.” Rather, it has a lot of ground to cover and only 90 minutes to do it—“Queen Bees” is a sizeable book—and needs “SNL’s” skill at caricature and two-second exposition. The movie creates its own self-contained universe rather than trying to mimic ours. The new girl is given a diagram that explains all the cliques—The Plastics, Jocks, Burnouts, Cool Asians, etc.—based on where they sit during lunch. Sex ed is reduced to “if you have sex, you will get pregnant, and you will die,” and the high school seems to be the same university building that doubles as the high school in dozens of movies. Janis describes her sidekick as “almost too gay to function” (he reminds me a lot of my friend Benjamin if he weren’t just pretending to be gay). Cady’s love interest (Joshua Bennett) works so well as a caricature of the sleepy-eyed and slow-moving dreamboat that those occasions when he expresses opinions seem out-of-place. That we learn so little of substance about him is fitting for a movie set entirely within girl world. We learn everything we need to know about what’s wrong with The Plastics, and America’s view of girlhood in general, when no one stops the five-year-old kid sister from slut-dancing and lifting her top in front of everyone.
The Plastics are, of course, all white, and my joy would have been indescribable if one of the guys from “Better Luck Tomorrow” was sitting at the Cool Asian table. The Sri Lankan kid played by Rajiv Surendra is worth mentioning. He is funny, in a random, always-maintaining-eye-contact way, and a cynic might dismiss him as a minority brought in for comic relief, or perhaps to show that Indian-Pakistani-Bangladesh-Sri Lankan cliques, as opposed to white cliques, encourage both brains and coolness. The movie presents him, however, as the only Sri Lankan in the school and independent of any ethnic clique. No expectations are made of him by the mainstream studentry. If he were the only black guy in the school the white students would subconsciously urge him to “act black,” to be funny, to dance, to become their pet arbiter of what’s cool. Instead, Surendra is free to do whatever he wants, which includes being a math whiz and performing a hip-hop dance at the talent contest. He is also brimming with self-confidence and a positive joy to be alive; free of social pressure, he seems to be genuinely having a good time with high school. If “Mean Girls” has a message, he makes it: “don’t let the haters keep you from doin yo thang.” To which Cady responds “did you just say ‘thang?’”
Finished October 4th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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