ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks
(1997) **1/2 (out of four)
Most of Hollywood is composed of revenge fantasies, of people who still carry hatchets around from their less-than-perfect formative years. Once everyone's eyes are on them, they can make the cool people look bad, make their parents out to be idiots, show their bossy superiors as hypocrites, and so on. ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION crosses that with a coming-of-age of '80s teen comedies. Age, not maturity. The characters are still as caricaturistic as ever, although a witty script and buddies Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow make it likable cinematic trash.
Sorvino and Kudrow are, of course, the title characters -- Romy and Michele, a couple ditzes still pretty much stuck in the Valley Girl era and still bitter about the pains exacted upon them in high school by the A-crowd. In the ten years since high school, they've accompished nothing aside from Romy's low profile clerk job. They live together, alone, spending their nights fishing for men in L.A. dance clubs or watching PRETTY WOMAN for the 36th time. And they still get teary-eyed when the snobs in the clothing store finally let Julia Roberts shop there.
In a time when movies from less than ten years ago have become "classics" that are cultural reference points for the uncultured boobs of Generation X, it's inevitable entire movies will be patterned the same way. If you don't believe me, sit there with a stopwatch during SCREAM and see if HALLOWEEN isn't mentioned every five minutes. The entire theme of ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION comes from that one replayed PRETTY WOMAN scene. These women have been shut out of the high-life and fully expect to receive the apologetic acceptance of the peers that rejected them when Kim Wilde's remake of "You Keep Me Hangin' On" was #1.
So when Romy runs into bitter woman in black Janeane Garofalo (a former classmate whose claim to fame is having invented a cigarette that burns twice as fast, "for the woman on the go") and hears of the upcoming ten year reunion, she and Michele decide they have to go to show up all their fellow alumni. Problem is, what is there to show off? I mean, besides the fact that they're both gorgeous, statuesque blondes. The movie considers their beauty a moot point, even having them both go on crash diets before their reunion, I guess to bring them down to 100 pounds from 102.
In fact, the least believable thing about ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION is the idea of the title characters as losers. Yes, they're not too bright, but come on, they're so lovable. And those freaky clothes they wear would make them the most popular girls in a modern high school. That doesn't stop director David Mirkin from including several flashback scenes where we see just how lame Romy and Michele's high school days were. Everyone plays themselves in the flashbacks, which is about as convincing as the rest of the movie.
ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION is based on a Robin Schiff play that Kudrow performed in years before her current turn on "Friends." The Michele character is a Phoebe clone Sorvino isn't too far removed from her MIGHTY APHRODITE days. But both are fun and exuberant, and Garofalo is as entertaining here as ever. There's even a great collection of '80s tunes from "Time After Time" to "She Blinded Me With Science." If there wasn't so much padded crap in here, the star rating would be higher, but as it is, I _almost_ liked it.
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