Blackboard Jungle : The laws of high school survival in Mean Girls
By Pamela Zoslov 

DOES ANYONE LOOK BACK FONDLY on their high school years? Maybe somewhere there is someone who had a grand old time, but the rest of us suffered mightily amid the cliques, competition and petty cruelties of high school (and junior high, for that matter). While the particular features of the landscape have changed (cell phones, computers, even the specter of Columbine), the experience remains the same as it ever was — awful.

In her screenplay for the comedy Mean Girls, Tina Fey, the Saturday Night Live writer and performer, takes an original approach to exploring this perilous world. Rather than writing yet another dumb high school comedy, Fey based her scenario on Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction bestseller, Queen Bees and Wannabes , a guidebook for parents on the cliques and stereotypes (with such names as Queen Bee, Sidekick, Torn Bystander, Messenger and Target) that rule their daughters' lives in school.

The story is told from the point of view of Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who at age 16 is attending school for the first time — her parents (Neil Flynn and SNL cast member Ana Gasteyer) are research zoologists who raised Cady in Africa, where she was home-schooled. On her first day at North Shore High School near Chicago, Cady experiences culture shock. Her familiarity with wild animals' behavior doesn't prepare her for the viciousness of high school girls and boys (“If you're from Africa, why are you white?”), and she spends her first days eating lunch in the girls' bathroom.

Soon she is befriended by a pair of fellow misfits, the cynical, artsy Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and the openly gay Damian (Daniel Franzese), who acquaint her with the school's clique culture, with a particular warning to avoid “The Plastics,” the tight group of pretty, vain girls led by the beautiful, blond “Queen Bee,” Regina George (Rachel McAdams). “Evil takes a human form in Regina George,” Janis warns Cady.

Because of Cady's fresh-faced beauty, she is embraced by The Plastics, and with Janis' encouragement, becomes a sort of double agent, pretending to be friends with The Plastics and reporting their gossip to Janis. But gradually she is seduced by the attention she gets by being “plastic,” and finds herself, like the other girls in Regina's retinue, desperately wanting the Queen Bee's approval. Though she is a math whiz, Cady decides not to join the nerdy “mathletes” team, because Regina tells her it's “social suicide.”

The Plastics have a lot of rules — “On Wednesday, we wear pink!” — and Cady unwittingly violates one of them by developing a crush on Aaron (Jonathan Bennett), a dreamy boy in her math class. Aaron, it turns out, is Regina's ex-boyfriend, and considered off limits. Regina responds by luring Aaron back into her life and telling him lies about Cady. A covert war begins: Regina and Cady pretend to be friends,while secretly sabotaging each other (Cady fattens up figure-conscious Regina by feeding her Swedish weight-gain bars; Regina subjects Cady to a “three-way calling attack.”) In her efforts to win Aaron, Cady lets her math grades slide, to the alarm of her concerned teacher, Ms. Norbury (Fey). Regina, whose character is somewhat reminiscent of Reese Witherspoon's high school princess-monster in Election , devises the ultimate revenge on Cady, which throws the whole school into an uproar.

Mean Girls is smartly written, with a finely tuned ear for teenage customs and vernacular, and is briskly directed by Mark Waters, who directed Lohan in last year's Freaky Friday remake. The performances are first-rate: Lohan is appealingly genuine, McAdams is sweetly wicked, and another SNL performer, Tim Meadows, has many of the funniest lines as the school's beleaguered principal.

Early in the film, parallels are drawn between Cady's African experience and her current experiences in the suburban “jungle,” but the metaphor isn't carried through. More's the pity, because that premise — high school as viewed from a socio-anthropological perspective — is the movie's most distinctive feature. Without it, Mean Girls is merely a better-than-average teen comedy which, like so many others, runs out of steam after the midpoint, wandering aimlessly toward a contrived conclusion in which differences are mended and lessons are learned.

I don't know how effective movies are as teaching tools – it didn't work with Reefer Madness or The Last Prom or last year's hysterical Thirteen — but the lessons in Mean Girls , about tolerance and kindness and responsibility — are easy to take, delivered as they are with a wink and a fair share of laughs.

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