Heathers
First screened in the early 1990s / Most recently screened and reviewed in November 2024
Director: Michael Lehmann. Cast: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Kim Walker, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Penelope Milford, Renée Estevez, Carrie Lynn, Jennifer Rhodes, Bill Cort, Lance Fenton, Patrick Labyorteaux, Jeremy Applegate, John Ingle. Screenplay: Daniel Waters. In Brief:
All these decades, I was sure I underrated it. Maybe not? Devilish humor with a bold POV but less than ideally executed.
VOR:④
Lehmann, Waters, & Co. did dream something new for the studio-adjacent 80s teen movie, with impacts on films, styles, and tones to follow.
I'll gladly credit Heathers with a point of view on adolescent social structures and for mordantly differentiating itself from any of its teen-focused market peers, after several years of The Hughes Supremacy. I'm also not surprised that it wasn't my favorite as a high school student and, though I've been doubting that reaction for 30 years since, still isn't my favorite now. It can't help that I liked high school; please don't feed me Dr?no. I also have to push myself to concede a worldview as cynical as this one (see also: most of Todd Solondz), and to rally behind a protagonist like Veronica Sawyer whose own breed of disingenuous complicity and awfulness would be utterly obvious if Heathers were told from any other perspective.
Heathers certainly has a bold or at least boldly intentioned script solidly in its plus column. Yes, the dialogue is pretty try-hard and more than occasionally off-putting. But if Joe Orton attended Westerberg High, we might well wind up in the vicinity where screenwriter Daniel Waters lands, with generous helpings of quotable shorthands ("What's your damage?" or "Veronica, why are you pulling my dick?"), clever throwaways ("I don't patronize bunny rabbits!"), and high-risk comic ironizing ("Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make"). Waters also manages three times to execute clever chess moves with major characters, dispensing with one way earlier and more summarily than you expect, promoting another from punchline side-player to key antagonist, and revealing a third whom we're cued to like as worse, surely, than the telegraphed villains. The pitch of the writing may not be to my taste but it's impressive, audacious work.
Through a combination of casting and playing, a couple of important performances turn out quite well: Shannen Doherty's and Kim Walker's in particular. Among the adults, Penelope Milford is an eccentric hoot as the most idealistic teacher, which hardly makes her a paragon of anything, and the actors playing Veronica's and J.D.'s parents as well as the school principal come across as deft pros with this type of heightened, oddball, amoral comedy.
Still, it's awfully hard to rebound from two differently inadequate leads and an awkward director. Ryder's offscreen persona and her taste in teams and projects were so crystal clear and so fetchingly unusual from the outset of her career that I totally get her casting here. You also need a total gung-ho enthusiast for this story told this way, in this register, for all the other troops to rally. You probably don't get the best parts of Heathers without her tone-setting leadership, onscreen and off. But, as happened more often than not in Ryder's enviably long prime (let's say, from Lucas through Girl, Interrupted) her sympathy for the part and the project and her desire to serve the material don't actually culminate in a proficient performance. Lotta verbal and physical stiffness, lotta face-pulling reactions, lotta attitude projection in place of characterization. Her eye on the big picture well exceeds the nimbleness of her individual contribution. But I'll take that in a prematurely hardened heartbeat over Christian Slater's approach, which is such a self-focused, blindingly obvious Jack Nicholson impression that he not only misfires creatively but would make many people think twice before casting this cocky showboat in something else. He's lucky more people kept taking chances on him, sorta like Nicolas Cage was after Peggy Sue Got Married, and I'm glad he's established himself over decades in the industry as, if anything, an uncommonly generous ensemble member.
Lehmann's limits in his first feature are more like Ryder's in her fourth or fifth. It's clear what movie he wants to make, and at times he serves up wickedly good ideas, like mounting the prologue's backyard croquet match as a thematically apropos and fully, wittily dressed slo-mo homage to De Palma's famous kickoff for Carrie. But the pacing of his direction is well off that of Waters's script, the shot set-ups are often pretty pedestrian, and any time he gets near a logistically complicated sequence (not that any are too complicated), he rises less than fully to the job. The woodsy double-murder and the late parallel action on a boiler room and a pep rally strike me as two clear examples of formal miscalculation, and the kinds of thing that peppier but also more technically proficient high-school satirists like Peyton Reed or Amy Heckerling would, I feel confident, have executed better.
So, that's my damage. But if you think Heathers is "very" (the o.g. "fetch"), more power to you. I'll stay in my corner with The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, whose omissions and emphases Heathers seems engineered to emend, and with Lehmann's later The Truth About Cats & Dogs, a sweeter and less ambitious movie that nonetheless, to my mind, more capably delivers on its promises. I don't have anything hugely against Heathers; I just don't have anything hugely for it, either. Grade:B–
