Take That!
Revenge Goes To The Movies

by Jane Haddam

ROMY AND MICHELLE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION.
Buena Vista Video, 1997.
Starring Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino, Janeane Garofolo. Directed by David Mirkin. Screenplay by Robin Schiff.

When a friend of mine discovered that I was writing a review of Romy and Michelle's High School Renunion, the only thing she could think of to say was, "How can you like a movie that stupid?"

She was right, of course. Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion is a stupid movie. In fact, it's a more than stupid movie. It's a spectacularly, embarrassingly, ridiculously, unrelievedly stupid movie. The screenplay needs to be anesthetized. A bad student in a tenth rate film school could have produced a more coherent narrative arc. Whole long minutes of film are taken up with bizarre side trips--a dream sequence, an extended dance sequence--that have nothing to do with the plot and that serve no perceptible purpose. Loose ends are not so much tied up as hacked off in last-minute throwaway clips that last a tenth the time of your average brain dead television commercial. Other loose ends aren't even hacked off. They just lie around, loose. I mean, what did become of that used Jaguar they borrowed to drive down to Tucson in?

But...

But...

But I do like Romy and Michelle's High School Renunion. I like it a lot. I own the VHS tape, and I watch it at home more often than I like to admit to. I'll almost certainly buy the DVD when the Gods of Capitalism finally make my tape machine extinct. For all its awfulness, I still think this movie contains the greatest exchange of dialogue in the history of film. For all its incoherence, I can pick out the main point and cheer it on through every second of technicolor confusion. I'm not the only one, either. By now, this movie has something like cult status with nearly every female over the age of 12 in the United States of America.

Let's face it: Americans differ on many things. They have different races and religions and ethnicities. They have different political philosophies, one of which they unfortunately vote into office every four years. They have different cultural backgrounds. They have different ideas about whether we should go to war in Iraq and whether watching the Super Bowl is a religion or an addiction.

But there is one way in which all Americans are alike, and it's this: they really hated high school.

And as for those few of us for whom this is not true, the rest of us say---phhhhhhhhtttt.

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So, here's the idea.

Romy and Michelle are best friends from Tucson, Arizona who, having left high school in less than a blaze of glory, now live in Los Angeles. A lot of people coming to this movie for the first time think that Romy and Michelle are high school popular girls who have fallen on the kind of hard times we all hope high school popular girls fall onto--dead end jobs, no college education, no boyfriends in sight. It's an easy mistake to make. With Michelle played by Lisa Kudrow and Romy played by Mira Sorvino, they're both Hollywood cotton-candy good-looking, right down to the spectacularly blonde hair that shines as if it's been cross-bred with mirrors. They're also not exactly the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Romy has a certain basic grasp of reality, but Michelle is as wackily clueless as any of the dumb blonde jokes circulating on the Net. Romy works as a cashier at a Jaguar dealership. Michelle used to be a salesgirl and is now unemployed. Their only claim to distinction is that they make all their own clothes.

Romy is at work one day when in walks the character any devotee of the high school revenge genre would expect to be the heroine of the piece, Heather Mooney, played with nonstop manic hostility by Janeane Garofolo. Janeane is what unpopular girls are supposed to be--the smart one who got really good grades but had flat hair and clothes that turned immediately shapeless on contact with her body. She's even managed to get what unpopular girls are supposed to get for their pains: money and success, in this case symbolized by her brand new Jaguar. Plus, Heather was, and still is, in love with a fellow high school geek named Sandy, who was in love with Michelle in high school, and broke Heather's heart.

Ah, you say--now we all know what happens. Romy and Michelle and Heather all go back to their high school reunion. Heather dazzles the crowd and gets Sandy to fall in love with her. Romy and Michelle slink off into well-deserved obscurity.

Right?

Wrong.

What happens is that the action moves to Romy and Michelle's Venice beach apartment, and a series of flashbacks--sensible ones, this time--reveal them to have been awkward, unpopular misfits in high school, preyed upon by an evil bitch of a cheerleader named Christie Masters.

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When I try to think seriously about this movie--which is a little like trying to think seriously about Marshmallow Fluff--the only thing I can come up with is that it works because the secondary characters work. Heather Mooney the Plain Jane Smart Girl, Sandy Frink the Science Geek, Toby Walters the Ultimate School Spirit Fat Girl (played with eery perfection by a young Camryn Manheim) are so familiar, and so sympathetic, they could be taking part in an afterschool special. Christie Masters (played by Julia Campbell) is about as good as it gets in evil bitch cheerleaders, because she's not only relentlessly vicious, but that kind of middle-of-the-road won't-threaten-anybody "cute" that teen-agers mistake for good-looking. The costuming helps, too. Christie's prom gown is something out of a bad joke about farm girls in Iowa. If there were any more ruffles on it, she could be at a costume party impersonating Shirley Temple. Her hair for the occasion is even worse, a mass of ringlets and barrettes reminiscent of Ann Gillis playing Becky Thatcher in the 1938 adaptation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

In spite of the silly clothes--or maybe because of them--Christie manages to maintain a level of malevolence that would do Cruella deVille proud. In the high school flashback sequence, she puts a lot of refrigerator fruit magnets on the back of Michelle's dress at lunch, where they stay because Michelle has her back in a metal brace. In the prom sequence, when Romy has worked up the courage to asked the boy she's got a crush on to dance, Christie stages a fake fit over Romy's supposed power over the guy and then sneaks the guy off on his motorcycle, leaving Romy to wait alone on the dance floor for an hour or two. Her character hasn't improved any after ten years off the cheerleading squad. When Romy and Michelle show up at the reunion, Christie seems to live for nothing but to find ways to humiliate them as publicly as possible.

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So, okay, high school wasn't quite that bad for most of us--even if it felt that bad for most of us, at least some of the time. But all of us have known Christie Masters in our lives, and some of us have known more than one. Bosses and supervisors, teachers, guidance counselors, insurance adjustors, principals: it's truly remarkable how many people in power use their positions to humiliate and belittle other people, and how often we feel too powerless to fight back against them. It's remarkable how much time most of us spend thinking about what we would like to happen to such people.

In Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, it happens, and that's why so many people watch this movie over and over and over again. It doesn't matter that Romy and Michelle's sense of "fashion" amounts to a penchant for making disco dance dresses that look like baby doll pajamas, or that Sandy Frink the geek genius can suddenly do dance routines as elaborate as anything ever choreographed by Martha Graham, or that that damned Jaguar is left sitting out in the desert with nobody to drive it back to California. In the end, Heather finds another boyfriend, and Christie is left screaming like a shrew for her husband (Romy's old crush) who's abandoned her to get a room to screw another girl (Romy, who doesn't bother to show up), and Romy and Michelle leave in a blaze of glory in Sandy Frink's helicopter. That's what you need in a high school revenge movie: the evil bitch cheerleader should end up with the worst possible fate. Preferably, she should end up that way in public so that everybody can laugh at her.

It's not Christian charity, but a lot of us aren't Christian, and a lot of us aren't that into charity. It's a hell of a lot of fun.

So rent the movie, or buy it, and take a moment to wonder why Robin Schiff was willing to let anybody know that he wrote this--and then sit back and watch that bitch Christie take it on the chin.

She deserves it.

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Oh, and by the way.

The greatest exchange of dialogue in the history of film?

It's this:

Michelle: Have you lost weight?

Romy: Actually, I have been trying this new fat free diet I invented. All I've had to eat for the last six days are gummy bears, jelly beans and candy corns.

Michelle: God, I wish I had your discipline.

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Read the script

JANE HADDAM is the Edgar and Anthony-nominated author of Somebody Else's Music (2002) and the upcoming Conspiracy Theory (2003). She has to say that, because no matter how many times she gets nominated, she never wins anything. Lately, this has begun to seem like some sort of plot, possibly concocted by the heirs of the Merovingian Dynasty working in cahoots with Donald Rumsfeld, the government of Venezuela, and Big Bird. She wears a tinfoil hat on her head, and she's home right this minute decoding the conspiracy's secret messages in Dude, Where's My Car? Uh, wait--no--that was--I mean...