: Jawbreaker
Author: Darren Stein
Director: Darren Stein
As a huge fan of Michael Lehmann’s 1989 dark comedy Heathers, I really wanted to see this movie when it came out last spring. Like Heathers, this is about high school cliques and murder, but unfortunately Jawbreaker, while it has a few cool scenes and a bit of interesting dialog, is low on the profound scale. Heathers broke ground; Jawbreaker is a retread. It’s not bad, and interesting to Heathers fans, just don’t expect too much. The plot of the movie is simple: a practical joke kills the most popular girl in school (she chokes to death on a jawbreaker). While Heathers mines material from the death of popularity — ungodly funeral scenes, brainless teachers eulogizing brainless students, unqualified parents weeping over a child they saw every other Tuesday, cliques fighting over who takes over for the dead girl — Stein shows us few reactions to the death, other than the evil girl who plots to cover it up. This has the effect of minimizing the importance of the death, treating it so much like a joke that we aren’t particularly dismayed by callousness of the others. Worse, in this movie, we’re supposed to care about the dead girl (she apparently really was a sweetheart), but we don’t. The most thoughtful line in the movie comes from the evil girl (Rose McGowen), who tries to make it look like the popular girl was killed by a sexual deviant: “[Society] will believe it because it’s their worse nightmare.” My favorite scene in the movie was the makeover montage during which the geek was turned into a princess: it borrowed from the creature workshop of Edward Scissorhands, humorous because the creation was not a monster in the traditional sense, but took ugliness and made it beautiful (but only on the outside). Clever. The ending’s weak. When the Queen Bitch gets her comeuppance at the senior prom… Cruel Intentions did that in a more subtle manner that was far more powerful. I watched the director-commented DVD version and came away appreciating what Stein wanted to do; I just don’t think he entirely succeeded. For instance, he revealed that circles and round shapes were used everywhere (like in the girls’ ear-rings and pearl necklaces) to remind us of jawbreakers, but he forgets that most movie viewers can barely see past the end of their noses, let alone interpret something as subtle as that! A minor movie that promises more than it delivers, but Stein’s good: I’ll watch to see what he comes up with next.
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