The thing about 2004’s Mean Girls is that it is basically a feature-length Saturday Night Live sketch. A really really good SNL sketch don’t get me wrong -written by one of the show’s then best writers Tina Fey. In fact if my generation had a Ghostbusters, a beloved, irreverent, endlessly quotable comedy, it would be Mean Girls. But Mean Girls IS a comedy, one that plays upon heightened high school archetypes in funny, creative ways. Its themes around high school cliques and social acceptance were not particularly innovative or interesting even then -it was simply a good teen comedy.
And then it became a high budget, moderately self-serious musical, and there the point seemed to have gotten lost. It became an intellectual property, and much like Ghostbusters of late, a far too sincere one. I haven’t seen the Mean Girls musical on stage obviously, but now we have a movie adaptation to spotlight all of its flaws in its stead.
Just like the original movie of course, it follows Cady Heron, played by Angourie Rice, going to public high school in the U.S. for the first time after years being home-schooled while her parents lived in Kenya. There she is embraced by a small clique of popular girls called ‘the Plastics’, led by the school’s appointed Queen Bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) -with whom she eventually comes into conflict over both a boy and her general mean-spirited personality.
Directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., from a script once again by Fey -who reprises her role as math teacher Mrs. Norbury, alongside Tim Meadows as Principal Duvall- the movie is from the start less explicitly honed in on Cady (a framing device is provided by Auli’i Cravalho’s Janis and Jaquel Spivey’s Damian -Cady’s initial friends at North Shore High) and it is more noticeably sanitized than the original film. It’s not a surprising or indeed problem choice for an update of a movie that came out in 2004, made liberal use of a popular slur at the time, featured a background running joke about a teacher’s inappropriate relations with students, and expressed some general attitudes that weren’t particularly considered. Yet their absence and replacement with tamer and safer qualities to the script and characters only emphasizes how much Mean Girls explicitly belongs to the time period it came out in.
In terms of plot, it made sense then that a girl like Janis would be ostracised and labelled a lesbian simply for not conforming to traditional femininity. In a modern sense that aspect of her character, and of Janis and Regina’s shared history has to be amended -made much more convoluted. Because even the villains of this movie aren’t allowed to be homophobic or ableist, regardless of whether or not it may be representative of how real mean teenagers are (indeed, I think this is why the original movie still stands up in spite of its poorly aged material). And while a part of this is certainly acquiescing, albeit cynically, to evolving times and sensibilities, another part is surely wrapped up in how popular outside of Mean Girls the Regina George character has become in the decades since. She is a meme as much if not more than a villain.
Playing that meme is Rapp in a decent enough imitation of Rachel McAdams -and certainly she's got the voice to carry the song sequences. Less capable in that department is Rice, though she otherwise plays Cady fairly well -if not allowed the same devices of self-awareness that coloured Lindsay Lohan's original take on the character. Indeed, interior commentary all through the film has quite naturally been replaced by songs and distributed more evenly among the cast. Even the secondary plastics, Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika), get their own numbers. Avantika is quite good actually, believably playing a ditziness that is related to yet substantively distinct enough from her predecessor Amanda Seyfried. Though Cravalho is the only real stand-out of the cast, especially as she gets the movie's only particularly good musical number "I'd Rather Be Me" -even as it completely sidelines an important narrative beat between Cady and Regina.
The movie has this tendency to miss the forest for the trees, honing in on the bits that people remember from the original movie without cultivating much the structure around them. So there are a lot of comedic bits for instance that are now either set against a more earnest tone that doesn't suit them or recontextualized in a way that they lose their effect: "Get in loser, we're going shopping" is played with an air of cool rather than irony. "Stop trying to make fetch happen" is emphasized for its emotional sting to Gretchen rather than simply a sharply delivered funny line. These and all the jokes that felt spontaneous originally now wreak of being manufactured, as the script and performers lean into them winkingly -most starkly exemplified by the "she doesn't even go here" line, delivered so poorly they try it again later and fumble it even harder. The makers of this film (and probably the musical more generally) don't appreciate how so many of these moments became famous off a specific context of delivery and ingenuity that simply cannot be recreated -even by Fey herself.
What doesn't help this deficit of voice is how little vision or tenacity is present in the filmmaking itself. Jayne and Perez are not particularly interested in crafting the movie to be distinct, even within a context allowing for expressive and flashy musical sequences. The tracking shots feel almost mechanical, and unlike something like The Color Purple there’s no feel of a stage; rather some sequences are blatantly aided by digital effects that robs them of immediacy. And the efforts to update corners of the story with modern touches like cell phones, Gen-Z slang, and social media don’t do a whole lot -aside from one musical number bent around something going viral that rips its idea off of Dear Evan Hansen. Few of the musical numbers are terrible, but as stated they generally don’t leave an impression. The one that seems to be the big hit of the stage production and that consequently the movie fixates exponentially on is “World Burn”, Regina’s villain song for when she executes her revenge. But in spite of Rapp and the directors’ best efforts, it doesn’t achieve the lustre it aspires for -not with the choices made in this format at least (I get the impression this song plays well on stage).
Despite the film taking itself a lot more seriously, it is broadly disingenuous -completely fuelled by nostalgia for the original Mean Girls and it never attempts to hide it. It jingles all the references and popular jokes while suppressing or else misunderstanding that wry punk sharpness that made the original a millennial classic. The musical numbers and new measures of tone and sensitivity are a shallow veneer of a fresh take -they don’t build on or re-contextualize the story in any meaningful way. All it does is prove that the cycle of cynical nostalgia reboots has officially come for the aughts, and that this current generation will most likely be deprived of their own equivalent to Mean Girls as a result.
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