Review of You Again (2010) by Shiira — 29 Sep 2010

For comparison's sake, since "You Again" gets it all wrong, the popular mother/unpopular daughter dynamic that forms the real heart(a black heart) of this unwise and unctuous comedy, was delineated to perfection back in the mid-nineties on Winnie Holzman's "My So-Called Life", the sublime ABC teen drama which starred a then-unknown Claire Danes, who as Angela Chase, an unformed and unaware fifteen-year-old girl with angst to burn, also lived in the shadow of a formidable mother(played by Bess Armstrong), a head cheerleader, back in the day, just like Gail(Jamie Lee Curtis), mother to Marnie(Kristen Bell), the proverbial late-bloomer.

Like most contemporary mainstream comedies, "You Again", the latest genre offering from a major studio, sucks again. Don't be bamboozled by the obfuscating games that prevents the narratorial truth from breaking free of its broad comedic straitjacketing.

It's mom, not Joanna(Odette Yustman), the mean girl from high school, who was, and still is, Marni's principal rival. The matching musical cues that accompany Odette and Ramona's first appearances, as focalized by Marni and Gail, respectively, does not entail a bonding between daughter and mother in shared misery, since their growing pains was an outgrowth of dissimilar high school experiences, whereas the former was subjected to victimhood, and the latter agonized over the fallout from perpetuating a friend's victimization.

With Patti, you never doubted for a second that she wanted nothing but the best for her sensitive daughter; she was never in competition with Angela. The former queen bee, so used to accolades and attention stemming from her good looks, knew when to step aside and give up the spotlight.

In Episode Five: "The Zit", a department store salesman at the cosmetics table pays Angela a compliment, which the mother mistakenly thought was directed toward her. After Patti collects herself, she seems pleased as punch that somebody appraised Angela as being a "pretty girl", despite the blow to her ego.

The memorable episode(mostly for its brilliant use of Enigma's "Return to Innocence") centers around the mother's solicitation of her daughter taking part in a mother/daughter fashion show, regardless of the pimple that Angela can't "swab" away.

This offer would still stand, one suspects, even if Angela had Marni's acne outbreak, because Patti Chase loves her daughter unconditionally, pom-poms or no pom-poms. The jury is out on Gail, however, and that's because the flashbacks in "You Again" are relegated to Marnie, without the context of her family, chiefly, the mom, who arguably seems to be the reason why this socially inept girl would be put in harm's way, through Joanna's crosshairs at cheerleader tryouts, in some feeble attempt to carry on the Byers legacy of pep squad eliteness.

Marni's stint as the team mascot, an alligator, speaks volumes about the pressure she was under to appease her mother's ardent belief in school spirit. "You Again" rigs the jury, but the filmmaker isn't wholly successful in suturing the truth about the Solondz-esque darkness that threatens the forced sunshine of this middle-class suburban family.

Marni's rags-to-riches story could be construed as an act of rebellion against the superficiality that had defined the charmed life which her mother enjoyed as a teenager. Although Gail knows that her son's fiancee was Marni's bane of existence, she gamely rubs salt in old wounds when she joins her fellow cheerleading alumnist in an old Gator routine.

Inexplicably, the mother forces Marni to share a room with Joanna. That music cue which introduces Ramona(Sigourney Weaver) is a host of borrowed notes which Gail hears whenever she sees Marni. That line about being satisfied with being a housewife, as she wades in the pool with Ramona is pure Disney; pure bulls*it to gloss over what's self-evident.

Through a series of contrivances, Marni reverts back to her former self: the bad haircut, the bad complexion, and most telling of all, which indicts Gail as a mean girl(as a teen, she stole Ramona's boyfriend) still, who never really changed her stripes, the mother saved her daughter's unflattering glasses.

Patti, on the other hand, would have stomped on those frames, because of the high school traumas that it signified.