Lindsay Lohan scores her second
starring role in as many years with Mean Girls, a dark comedy about surviving the
zoo that is high school. Lohan proved she could straddle the teen and adult worlds in last
year’s Freaky Friday, and she is also strong here as a 15-year old who is suddenly
forced to fit into the complicated social structure of North Shore High in Evanston, Illinois,
after having spent her first 14 years being home-schooled in the African bush by her zoologist
parents. She finds two misfit friends relatively quickly but is also spotted by “the
Plastics”, the 3-girl clique at the top of the school’s social pyramid. Soon she
is trying to please both sets of friends without losing her sanity . . . and herself.
The screenplay for Mean Girls, written
by Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey, is based in part
on ideas presented in Rosalind Wiseman’s New York Times
bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends
and Other Realities of Adolescence. The film does a good job of showing the allure
of being popular even when your head and heart tell you the popular crowd is not worth looking
up to. A cross between 1995’s Clueless and 1989’s Heathers,
Girls intersperses comic touches with a relatively serious story about the emotional
damage that girls can do to each other. It is a film well-worth seeing by its teen- and
twenty-something female target audience, even if it isn’t for everyone.
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