FilmBlather.com

"I can't go out. I'm sick."
"Boo. You whore."

At a time when most teen comedies are toothless and saccharine, it's a pleasure to see the spirit of Heathers alive and well in Mean Girls, a fairly brilliant satire written by long-time Saturday Night Live scribe Tina Fey. Clever as all get-out and unexpectedly thoughtful to boot, the movie should add some edge to the flourishing career of Lindsay Lohan, who is beginning to develop quite a following not only among pre-teen girls but in movie buff circles as well.

The best performance in the film, however, comes not from Lohan but from one Lizzy Caplan, a tremendously charismatic newcomer who brings such a memorable personality to her clichéd role -- the frumpy sarcastic fringe element girl whom everyone suspects of being a lesbian -- that it' not just her character who takes on an extra dimension, but everyone who interacts with her. It's a part that's firmly planted in "supporting" territory -- perhaps too much so to get the recognition it deserves -- but Caplan nonetheless owns a hefty chunk of the movie's soul.

The script is written with one leg in the teen movie universe, another in the realm of satire, and a third entrenched in farce. The story, involving a shy, heretofore home-schooled girl who enters high school and has to infiltrate the inner circle of the much-despised social elite, sounds precisely like Heathers-lite, but the approach taken by Fey and director Mark Waters (responsible for the equally appealing but considerably less wicked Freaky Friday) suggests something different. They don't neglect the occasionally incisive social commentary (the reference to "sexually active band geeks" is particularly satisfying") but they also pay quite a bit of attention to individual gags -- scenes have comic momentum of their own, building big punchlines out of hysterical throwaways.

The dialogue vaguely resembles words that might emerge from the mouths of high-schoolers, but it also sparkles with a genuine wit you never, ever see in movies like this. It manifests itself in non sequitur exchanges ("I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I only date women of color." "I have to pee."), in comedic set pieces ("My purse! It looks like he's headed for the projection room above the auditorium!") and in characters' exasperated anger ("Gretchen! Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen! It's NOT going to happen!"). Even the film's more ordinary conversations feature verbal acrobatics that combine teenspeak with uncannily clever turns of phrase. It's never anything less than a delight.

Rather than simply devolving into treacly moralizing, Mean Girls eloquently speaks of treating other people with respect -- a message missing from the painfully lazy kiddie therapist movies that prefer to spout inane platitudes about "being yourself." The ending is more unabashedly positive than the rest of the film, but as upbeat conclusions go, this one is pretty on the ball (as was Heathers'), deftly avoiding the things that tend to make happy endings vomit-inducing.

The movie may be hampered by a mostly unremarkable advertising campaign -- Paramount, which is pretty much dead in the water as it stands, should have tried a marketing push half as clever as the film itself. Sure to be one of the better mass-market entertainments of the summer, Mean Girls has the potential to pull off a surprising early-season coup, assuming the trailer doesn't fool people into thinking this to be another Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (if I remember correctly, this is pretty much what happened to the similarly ingenious Sugar and Spice three years ago). This may be a teen comedy, but it's a teen comedy for anybody who loves comedy.