‘Mean Girls’ mean business

RAY BUFFER

Raised in Africa, Cady Heron, played by Lindsay Lohan (“Parent Trap,”

“Freaky Friday”) and her family move to the United States, where

after having been home-schooled until the age of 16, she enters

public high school for the first time and falls prey to the social

bullying and cliques that reign in today’s world of girls.

Directed by Mark Waters (“Freaky Friday”), from a screenplay by

Tina Fey (“Saturday Night Live”), “Mean Girls” is a comedy based on

Rosalind Wiseman’s New York Times bestseller, “Queen Bees and

Wannabes” -- a book meant to be a parent’s guide to identifying the

role one’s daughter may play in the hierarchy of teen angst and peer

pressure.

What begins as a typical teen movie at times elevates before

digressing back to sophomoric humor. Lohan is pleasant and believable

as the girl who becomes her own enemy. Fey seems comfortable in her

cool-teacher, Wiseman-

clone role. Rachel McAdams turns out a convincing performance as

the Queen Bee (the ringleader of the girl clique known by subversives

as “The Plastics”) who is eventually dethroned. Amanda Seyfried and

Lacey Chabert provide adequate ensemble chemistry as the Queen Bee’s

lackeys. Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese turn in smart and engaging

work as Cady’s true anti-clique friends. Rajiv Surendra is frequently

amusing as a teen-Indian-rapper-”mathlete.”

Fey’s “Saturday Night Live” buddies appear in a variety of roles:

Tim Meadows is the school’s stringent yet understated principal, the

always hilarious Ana Gasteyer is given a stale, pasty role as Cady’s

mother and the plum adult role is bequeathed to Amy Poehler, who

plays the mother of the Queen Bee -- an overly permissive mother with

an inappropriate relationship with her pet.

The direction by Mark Walters is soft and sometimes jumbled, but

the cast and material pulls through. The music by Rolfe Kent is

forgettable. In fact, I’ve forgotten it already. The editing could

have been better. Many shots seem to be cut a second or two out of

sync so that from one angle you see a group of people doing one thing

and in the next angle supposedly a split second later, more time

seems to have passed or the extras are facing the wrong way.

The script by Fey is often clever, rarely stupid or cheap. My one

contention with the writing is that when the film begins to reach its

end, and Fey gets on her soapbox, the dialogue she spews is unlike

anything we have heard before in the film. It is because she is

speaking with Rosalind Wiseman’s voice, using text and speeches taken

directly from Wiseman’s book and public appearances and somehow, the

audience is asked to accept that a self-deprecating, divorced math

teacher becomes an innovative expert in child psychology.

In the end, “Mean Girls” seems like two different movies slapped

together, but it still works.

* RAY BUFFER, 34, is a professional singer, actor and voice-over

artist.