E-Mail This Article to a Friend MEAN GIRLS

It may well be that the meanest girl in this uneven satire is the screenwriter (she adapted Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabes) and co-star, Tina Fey of SNL. Like her character, long-suffering teacher Ms. Norbury, she seems unsure whether she feels sympathy for girls younger and prettier than herself, like the film’s chipper heroine, Cady (Lindsay Lohan), or whether she’d like to see them run over by a bus. Cady suffers similar ambivalence when she finds herself stuck in the jungle of a suburban high school after her naturalist parents relocate her from the African savannah to Illinois. Her naïveté both attracts and repels the reigning clique, the Plastics, a kind of pink-clad version of 1989’s Heathers, and their tyrannical Queen Bee, Regina (Rachel McAdams). Encouraged by punky outsider "Janis Ian" (Lizzy Caplan, no society’s child) and her gay pal Damian (Daniel Franzese, one of the best things in the movie), Cady decides that to beat the Plastics she must join them. It turns out that being mean is fun and empowering, but before Cady can succeed Regina, you know that Ms. Norbury’s going to set things right with a speech. As in his previous film, Freaky Friday, Mark Waters draws a rich performance from Lohan, but Fey’s mix of bromide and bile is no mean feat.