Heathers has a lot to answer for. A few razor-sharp black comedies set in high school followed in its wake, but mostly we got cheap imitators like 1999’s Jawbreaker. This is a movie that wants to be a biting satire, but it doesn’t have any bite. Even worse, it isn’t very funny.
The movie opens with Judy Greer’s narrator introducing us to the coolest girls in her school, as played by Rose McGowan, Rebecca Gayheart, Julie Benz and Charlotte Ayanna. Ayanna won’t be in the picture for very long—at least, in anything but flashbacks or as a corpse.
The other three thought it would be funny to prank her by staging a home invasion, abducting her while she’s still sleeping. McGowan shoves a jawbreaker in the girl’s mouth and they throw her in the trunk of a car. When the open the trunk for the next stage of her humiliation, they discover she has asphyxiated, the massive candy stuck in her throat. I wonder if the image was supposed to be funny, but I can’t imagine anybody would think it is. At least, I’m not sure I would want to know anybody who finds it funny.
The ineptitude of the trio in covering up the death should have generated some laughs, but nothing about it clicked. McGowan phones the school pretending she’s Ayanna’s mother and that the girl will be out sick that day. Nothing funny happens in the course of the call. It is later decided to relocate the dead girl’s corpse to her bedroom and make it appear to be the result of an attempted rape and homicide. Needless to say, there aren’t any laughs to be found there, either.
While staging the crime scene, the gang is unaware Greer had been sent to Ayanna’s house with her missed assignments. In the hallway, she overhears them loudly discussing the situation and, inexplicably and explicitly stating what really happened.
I neglected to mention Greer’s appearance up to this point. It is immediately obvious she will be transformed into a swan once they remove the makeup that makes her looks like she has a perpetual cold. It wouldn’t hurt to also get her some clothes that aren’t sweaters with arms longer than her own.
That transformation occurs when she accepts McGowan’s offer of a trade: Greer’s complicity, for which she will be made one of the most popular girls in the school. If Greer’s character was supposed to be a decent person at heart, then her instantaneous acceptance of that offer doesn’t ring true. Cut to a bizarre fantasy montage of her getting a makeover, all shot in a manner that desperately wants to cop Tim Burton’s style for no discernable reason.
Gayheart suddenly develops a conscience and exiles herself from the group. Soon, she’s wearing a lot of denim, which I assume is some sort of visual shorthand for being a decent human being. She also starts dating the star of the drama department. It doesn’t seem to me she slipped too far down the social ladder, but what do I know? I didn’t even know where the ladder was when I was a student.
In the meantime, Greer has surpassed McGowan in popularity and briefly tops the social food chain. Inevitably, she will discover popularity is the most fragile substance on earth. Still, Green acts rings around McGowan as effortlessly as her character outmaneuvers her socially for a while there.
The film has little to say about the high school experience that hasn’t been said many times before, and often times better. I wasn’t expecting trenchant insights, but I was hoping for at least a few decent jokes. It is shocking this was released the same year as Election, which is at the opposite end of some sort of scale. Just think of any moment from that film and then consider an alleged joke here, where four rail-thin girls share a small box of raisins, their lunch at “The Karen Carpenter table”.
One of the few surprising ideas is the crush Greer is revealed to have had on the dead girl. It is never portrayed as crossing over into a sexual fixation, but it doesn’t take much to imagine it could go in that direction. A brief moment I thought was interesting has Greer obsessed with the numerous beauty marks on the back of the girl’s neck, which she imagines forming various constellations and other shapes that then become animations.
The adult cast isn’t given much to do, by which I mean the people cast in roles as adults, and not all of the obviously over-20 actors playing high school students. To not make good use of Carol Kane should be a criminal offense, yet here she is given little to do as the school principal. Faring slightly better is Pam Grier as a detective. She gets to be intimidating, but that’s something she could do in her sleep.
There’s also a cameo by Marilyn Manson, as some shlub McGowan enlists to make the staged attempted rape of the corpse more convincing. Hey, weren’t those two engaged around the time this picture was made? I wonder how that turned out…
Even the soundtrack isn’t a good as it should be. This should be a solid wall of tracks by respected new bands trying to make it big. The Veruca Salt track over the opening credits is probably the best song here, but that was already several years old at this point. There’s also The Cars and The Scorpions, as if high school students in 1999 were listening to either of those. At least The Donnas are the band at the prom, however improbable that may be.
Perhaps the most baffling aspect of Jawbreaker is a persistent whiff of “girl power” so much media of the time tried to capitalize on, when every girl here is varying amounts of pettiness, vindictiveness or mousiness. But what I found most interesting is how the dead girl, who is truly the center of the story, is denied a voice.
Dir: Darren Stein
Starring Rose McGowan, Judy Greer, Rebecca Gayheart