Jawbreaker (1999)

reviewed by
Mr. Bryan Frankenseuss Theiss


JAWBREAKER

In Jawbreaker, the braindead teen angst comedy from writer/director Darren Stein, a Heathers-like clique of popular high school girls led by the venomous Courtney (Rose McGowan) accidentally asphyxiate one of their own while kidnapping her as a birthday prank. They decide, as teens sometimes will, to return the dead friend to her bedroom and make it look like she was raped. The scheme gets complicated when the timid, socially retarded school misfit Fern Mayo (a cartoonish Carrie lookalike in a fright wig) discovers their plot. Courtney makes Fern an offer she can't refuse: if Fern doesn't tell anyone that the nice popular girl she has a crush on has been murdered, Courtney will give Fern a makeover to make her popular. The audience is not given any compelling evidence that any human being would go for this ludicrous deal. But hey, says Stein, they're only teens. What do they want, believable characters and situations? Sheesh. Jawbreaker is one of the best examples ever of a high school movie that seems to come from filmmakers who never went to high school, but instead watched a lot of movies about it. Unlike the earlier dark teen angst films that it blatantly apes (mainly Heathers and Carrie), it seems completely clueless about what is funny and terrifying about being a teenager. Stein clumsily imitates superficial aspects of those films without ever capturing their satirical accuracy, their emotion, their storytelling or their characterization. You don't believe in these characters or what happens to them and you can't be sure how you're supposed to feel about them. All you know is that whatever it is, you don't feel it. Heathers is powerful because it has protagonists we relate to and villains we know in the real world, and it slashes at them with a dark, morbid wit. Stein goes for the morbid and leaves out the wit. His villains remind us of the villains in the other films more than they remind us of the real people those films remind us of. But even as super villains they're not as successful. McGowan's most-popular-girl-in-school is a "megabitch," but she doesn't have any of the enjoyable wickedness of Shannen Doherty's Heather. Daniel Waters' memorable Heathers dialogue is full of invented slang ("What is your damage, Heather?"), clever insults ("Grow up, Heather - bulimia is so '87", "Football season is over. Kurt and Ram had nothing left to offer this school but date rapes and AIDS jokes") and occasional surprising vulgarities ("Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw!", "Why are you pulling my dick, Veronica?"). Stein isn't that funny - he tries to give the dialogue a crispness by sandwiching 'fucking's between phrases ("Peachy fucking keen") but it just comes off as pale imitation. Heathers doesn't just take a big bite out of high school life, chew it up and spit it out on the floor. It knows its targets and attacks them with precision. It paints a vivid portrait of a world of cruel teenagers and parents whose understanding of their kids' problems comes from clueless local news reports. A world of macho dads who bury their sons in football helmets, flakey hippie teachers who try to heal the school with "The New Happiness" banners, a preacher who sees the word "eskimo" underlined in a dead girl's copy of Moby Dick and says, "Let's hope she's rubbing noses with Jesus!" Part of the believability is in the little, knowing details - the jock with the Sports Illustrated football phone, the reference to the 8th grade boyfriend who's into mythology, the college party goons with the Sharper Image poster on their wall. Jawbreaker doesn't have knowing details, because it doesn't know shit. It presents a crude Pee-Chee doodle of high school culture - you really never get a feel for the inhabitants of the school or the "cruel politics" of their world. In fact, you hardly get to know the characters, or the movie itself. It's a short movie, just over 90 minutes, but it's loaded with flashbacks to earlier scenes, as if you might have forgotten. It's like an hour long TV special with commercials. It never really feels like characters or scenes, just actresses rushing through plot points. Most of the minor characters use an atrocious, sub-Troma style of comedy acting to deliver lines like "Oh my god! That is soooo cool!" - the kind of satirical dialogue that was cutting edge in a certain region of California when these characters were in kindergarten. Today it's not an observation, it's an echo of a cliché of an out of date observation. There is even a football player character who seems to be modeled after Kurt from Heathers. Both characters look way too old to be in high school, and both have 1987 hairdos. The do is most distracting in the 1999 movie. This character might have seemed a little out of date when I was in high school, but in a contemporary movie he's ridiculous. Along with the unbelievable high school world comes unbelievable behavior. You don't believe Julie (Rebecca Gayheart) when she stops hanging out with her popular, murderer friend and for some reason has to start dressing down. And you really don't believe Fern's transformation into the popular Vylette. She goes from mousy, mumbling Carrie White to cocky, talkative valley girl superbitch (at one point looking like Princess Diana as Amber from Clueless) and back to shy misfit, without convincing evolution or motivation. You are never given any reason to relate to her as she covers up the murder in exchange for fashion tips, but at the end, when she abruptly joins the good guys, it seems you are supposed to forgive her. Heathers isn't a perfect film - its cheesy keyboard scoring has always grated on my nerves, and many people are driven crazy by Christian Slater's whole Jack Nicholson shtick. But it helped me get through high school because it so perfectly reflected how I saw the world at that age. It made me feel like I wasn't alone. I can't imagine that teens will relate as strongly to Jawbreaker. Like most of the recent slew of teen movies, it has a weird view of popular kids vs. social outcasts that doesn't come very close to jibing with reality. When Fern gets made over as Vylette, the whole school talks about her and follows her around and applauds her arrival at school as if she were a rock star. When they find out that she is actually Fern, the quiet girl with the fake looking wig, they are disappointed and angry, they mob her and chant at her and hit her until she is bloodied and unconscious and laying on the floor wrapped in xeroxed photos of her old yearbook photo. It's difficult to relate to this kind of scene because throughout the horrible history of high school humiliations on this planet, nothing even remotely similar to this has ever happened. We can't believe in her rise or her fall - I mean, would anyone really care? At worst, they'd stop talking to her.

The obvious model for Jawbreaker, besides Heathers, is Carrie. And as mentioned earlier, Fern is obviously meant to look like Carrie. But Carrie is a believable outcast. She doesn't fit in because her mom is a crazy, abusive zealot; girls pelt her with tampons and pig's blood because she has her period in the gym shower and doesn't know what's happening to her. They don't understand Carrie and they hate her for it. But Fern's biggest sin is looking like Carrie. She's quiet and she's awkward, but she's just not pelting material. There is one enjoyable homage to Carrie: the parents of the dead girl (seen only for a few seconds) are played by William Kat and PJ Soles. So it's really piling it on too thick later in the film when a character suggests going to prom and Fern says, "Oh yeah, why don't we stop by the slaughterhouse and pick up some pig's blood?" And then it really goes over the line when the climax is modeled after De Palma's classic bucket of blood sequence, but without the virtuoso technique or the suspense or the blood or the telekinetic aftermath. (There's also what seems to be a Blue Velvet reference - Fern smells a rose and is horrified when an ugly centipede crawls out of it - but I'm not sure why.) One of the more preposterous scenes has Julie casually telling her new boyfriend about the murder - only as background information to explain Vylette's makeover. Suddenly the conversation shifts to righteousness and "You've got to do something!" and Stein seems to expect us to relate to Julie. Julie decides to turn in Courtney, so she meets with the detective investigating the case (Pam Grier, who is so likable that I could almost buy a line like, "Some of the sweetest candies are as sour as death inside" before I thought, "Wait a minute, Pam, why are you saying these lines? You escaped the world of Steven Seagal movies for this?"). The detective reveals that there is a man being held as a suspect in the murder, Julie figures out that Courtney is framing a stranger, and inexplicably she leaves without telling the detective the truth. (The suspect is played, briefly, by McGowan's offscreen fiancee, Marilyn Manson, who looks funny in a mustache. His tiny walk-on must have had something cut; early publicity was hyping up a "shocking sex act" which as far as I could tell never materialized. If he ever breaks up with McGowan his buddies will surely give him shit for being whipped into appearing in such a lame attempt at a hard-edged black comedy.) Later, when Julie finds a recording of Courtney confessing to the murder, she doesn't bring it to Grier because the plot requires her to instead perform an uninspired prom prank - the old "play a recording of the villain saying something self-incriminating while she is making a speech" routine. Of course, in the world of bad movies, playing the recording over the PA system involves a complex under-the-clock rewiring rather than just commandeering a microphone. Worse, the consequences of being proven a murderer in front of an audience are more like what you'd expect as punishment for a bad standup routine - everyone calls Courtney a bitch and throws flowers at her. I don't think this is supposed to be a swipe at the superficiality of high school culture. It's just another scene that develops Stein's weak motifs at the expense of story and character. And by this point the film has completely abandoned things like Fern's opening narration and the implication that she is a lesbian. Shit, says Stein, these kids grew up on MTV - they won't remember what I showed them 90 minutes ago. Jawbreaker is more insidious than other bad teen movies of the '90s because it purports to be anti-establishment. Whereas Can't Hardly Wait and She's All That really believed in the teen institutions of Prom Queen and Class President and Cute Couple and Thrower of Parties, Jawbreaker tries to cast those things in a wicked light and stand up for the outcasts. But it's empty and out of touch. It doesn't even pretend that the outcasts are any less hollow than the cheerleaders. In Scream, Skeet Ulrich reminded everyone of Johnny Depp. Now the actor who plays Julie's new boyfriend reminds me of Skeet Ulrich. He's a good analogy for Jawbreaker: a second generation copy of an American original. (Don't apply the analogy to Christian Slater's Jack Nicholson imitation in Heathers, though - that would be… uh… cheating or something.)

--Bryan Frankenseuss Theiss

"I write rhymes so fresh I try to bite my own verses." --Tash


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