Heathers

The patently non-realistic approach of Heathers acts to foreground the conventions of the high school comedy with which it plays in a darkly comic way. Or at least it tries to but with only middling success and in the wake of events like the 1999 Colombine High massacre, with questionable wit.

The film starts off well enough with some nicely-judged satire but by midway Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters have lost their grip over the material which meanders one way then another before degenerating into a finale that mashes up Rebel Without A Cause with some half-baked action movie about a crazed bomber

Winona Ryder stars as Veronica, a teen who has sold out on her daggy friends in order to join the ultra-fashionable clique of "Heathers", three preppies all sharing the same first name. She’s pretty much sick of them when Christian Slater’s J.D., a charming young dude who, it soon transpires, is seriously dysfunctional and before you can say. “psycho”, one of the Heathers is dead, her murder by J.D. and Veronica passed off as suicide.

For some inexplicable reason the film is highly regarded Stateside where it has somewhat of a cult status. To be fair, the pat ending was forced upon Lehmann by the distributors, New World, but even so, its driving force is more about revenge, always a popular response with arms-bearing Americans, of the disaffected than any insight into teen angst and ultimately it has little to say. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, 1995. which has pretty the same subject matter, bar the killings, did the high school clique thing so much better)

Winona Ryder and Christian Slater were bright young things when this was made but Slater's gradually faded and Ryder's career went off the rails whilst Lehmann has since had a middling directorial career in film (including the Bruce Willis dud, Hudson Hawk 1991, also penned by Waters) and television.

 

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