Girls on Film

As everyone who has ever attended school knows teenage girls are possibly the most vicious creatures on this earth, unfortunately for Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) she’s never been to school before. Mean Girls tells the story of Cady (pronounced like Katie) who after a childhood being home schooled in Africa, enters the school system for the first time at an over ripe seventeen. Cady, clueless at first, is quickly embraced by both the unconventional Janice (Lizzie Caplan) and Damien (Daniel Franzese) and the ‘Plastics’ the most popular (and therefore evil) girls in school. Persuaded by Janice to infiltrate the Plastics in order to bring them down from the inside, Cady embarks on a sabotage mission that leaves her in danger of becoming a little cold, hard and shiny herself as the reality of being beautiful, popular and feared becomes all too appealing.

On the more basic and perhaps audience pleasing level the jokes come thick and fast and are supported by an ensemble cast delivering wonderful comic performances. The token ‘actress in her late twenties playing a teenager’ is the 28 year old Rachel McAdams (playing 17 year old Regina George) who fortunately for us has escaped from Rob Schneider’s overacting (his manic mincing in ‘The Hot Chick’ shamelessly drowned out McAdams’ great comedy performance) and shines as a girl so narcissistic and desperate she’s practically insane. The other two Plastics Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried are both fantastic and consistently funny, Chabert’s love/hate relationship with McAdams’ character being a highlight. Lindsay Lohan is warm and witty in equal measures and as the narrator and emotional core of the film satisfies totally (on a more lowbrow level I’m a straight woman and even I found her breasts near hypnotic). The adults in the film are equally impressive Fey herself, Tim Meadows and Amy Poehler (only five years older than her on screen daughter McAdams) all deserve huge amounts of credit, Poehler’s ‘cool Mom’ is particularly grotesque. Even in an ensemble cast though, there is always a star and in ‘Mean Girls’ case it’s undoubtedly Daniel Franzese as Damien. Dubbed by his best friend Janice as ‘almost too gay to function’, thanks to Franzese, Damien is not a big camp stereotype. He gets all the best lines and delivers them impeccably (“Danny Devito, I love your work”) and manages to make a performance of ‘Beautiful’ by Christina Aguilera one of the funniest and most endearing scenes ever to grace a teen comedy.