Review of Heathers (1989) by Kenneth L — 29 Sep 2011

Given its apparent target audience of teenagers, this is one strange little film. It's a comedy about bitchy high schoolers, but there's a weird divergence between content and tone, I think. What actually happens here is really dark and mean, like something the Coen brothers might have dreamed up in high school; but both the characters and the movie seem to treat it with a curiously flippant attitude.

The plot involves a popular girl with a conscience (Winona Ryder) who becomes disgusted with the way her cliquish friends, the three Heathers of the title, are cruel towards the less popular kids at their school. When she meets a superficially charming bad boy rebel (Christian Slater, looking even more like a ferret than usual), she is persuaded to begin a campaign of vengeance against the mean girls, but gets in over her head when people start dying.

I liked Winona Ryder here, but that may have more to do with my lifelong love of her (inspired by a viewing of Beetlejuice when I was young) than her actual performance in the film. Still, I thought she handled the weird material as well as she could. Christian Slater's performance (he looks so much like a ferret!) honestly isn't as convincing, mostly because his voice is too reedy to pass for a tough guy, but he was a fun element in the film anyway. Given the title of the film, the Heathers (Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, and Kim Walker) get surprisingly little development or memorable moments - they're mostly archetypal high school popular bitches.

What bothered me about the movie, I guess, was the weird discrepancy between the murder and the comedy. This was surely intentional, but it kind of feels like the movie doesn't quite want to follow through on its darker leanings. There's nothing wrong in principle with comedies about murder and crime - Fargo is a hilarious movie about people getting killed, but it goes full-bore on the murder part. Here, people get killed, but then the murders get mixed in with cheap gay jokes and sight gags. It's as if the murders aren't real within the world of the movie, and have little consequence aside from the sentimental media craze they stir up (which, admittedly, is handled in a funny and satirical fashion). The movie has the look and feel of a more typical '80s teen comedy. I suppose this is a good satire of teenage meanness and such, but I feel like as a movie it could have held together better.