Review of Heathers (1989) by Diego T — 09 Mar 2014

It's not often that you come across a comedy about teen suicide, but damn is it ever refreshing. One of my requirements for a comedy to be truly great is that it tackles tough subjects, usually at the risk of offending some people, and still is able to pull off some seriously biting satire. Heathers certainly does that. As I said recently in my review of Mean Girls, some movies are funny because they make fun of easy targets. The Hangover is hilarious, but jokes about Las Vegas have been done to the death. However, the things that Heathers goes after are not even close to being easy targets-- in fact, if they weren't handled so masterfully, this movie would probably be pretty offensive. But because I agree with the film's sentiment (especially about reactionary teachers and parents in an age where all teenagers are "suicide risks" as declared by the media), this film is able to fully pull it off.

Heathers stars Winona Ryder as Veronica, whose best friends (Heather, Heather, and Heather) are getting on her nerves. Enter the charismatic sociopath JD (Christian Slater), who encourages Veronica to try new things. Unfortunately, those things include having sex on her parent's lawn and killing fellow students to make them look like suicides. This is a sensitive topic at best, but the way the film goes about it is realistic, funny, and will probably hit way too close to home for some people. By now, pretty much every school district in America has probably had that community-rattling moment where students kill themselves, each other, or bring a knife to school or some shit. Hell, just last week some retard at my school got high and tried to jump off a bridge. Heathers really nails the types of reactions that are typical to situations like this. There's the hippie-dippie teacher who tries to get everyone to join hands and love each other for one day as if that'll instantly solve all their problems. There's the parents who immediately take it upon themselves to make sure that their daughter isn't a suicide case, but are completely inept in both preventing it and reassuring her. And, of course, there are the students, none of whom really give a shit.

The film is surreal and weird, with moments of black humor that bleed (no pun intended) seamlessly into regular teen comedy fare. There are cow tipping jokes immediately followed by murders. Some will say that "After Columbine, this dark comedy isn't as funny" (actually, some bitch from Common Sense Media said exactly that), but that misses the point entirely. This film is practically a warning about the post-Columbine era; a prescient piece of work that accurately predicts within a fraction of a percent what the world is like during the age of terror. If Columbine is what it took for these people to understand that high school is no picnic, may God have mercy on their souls.

Although it's certainly got a lot going for it in terms of its cynical message, Heathers is especially elevated by Winona Ryder's career-best performance. She's got an old Hollywood-style innate likability about her, not to mention the fact that she's playing a very likable character in a believable way. Veronica herself is not only a genuinely cool person, she's also a fucking badass (at the end, at least, which I shall not spoil). Aside from her soft spot for mildly homicidal boyfriends, she's the kind of person you'd want to go to high school with. Slater, meanwhile, doesn't have a very realistic character (sure, there are crazy kids, but this is pushing it), but at least he plays it well. The pair's on-again off-again relationship, with the added complication of a few murders, is enough to put every teen movie cliche to rest.

Final Score for Heathers: 8/10 stars. This is a truly unnerving film, and if you're easily offended by the concept of teenagers killing themselves, you should probably skip this one. However, if you can swallow some retrospectively not-so-PC material in order to experience seriously dark social satire and comedy, you'll probably find this to be the high school equivalent of Fight Club. Unlike The Lovely Bones, it never falls into the pitfall of making its serious subject matter a trivial thing, and instead focuses more on the reactions to what happens in the movie and the overall hopelessness and pessimism of it all. At the end of the day, people who complain about the movie's subject matter aren't getting its basic message: Although life is pointless, suicide is not the answer. Also, teachers are retarded.