“Mean Girls” (2004)
With her biggest role to that point being
in 2002’s “The Hot Chick,” which not even the most avid of McAdams’ fans
can bear to sit through more than once (only the nadir of the body-swap
genre would have anyone body-swapping with Rob Schneider), she was again cast as a bitchy high school Queen Bee in her very next film. But this time, it would be in the generation-defining high
school comedy “Mean Girls” directed by Mark Waters from the script by
Tina Fey. It’s funny that McAdams, whose subsequent star image often
plays on the inherently sympathetic appeal, should find
her first really great role as a villain, but that’s exactly what her
unforgettable Regina George is. Spoiled, petty, narcissistic and
manipulative, she is almost the antithesis of Romantic Lead McAdams (who
is invariably both steadfast and self-deprecating: “I look a bit like a
squirrel” she claims in “About Time“). As a result, it’s Regina who
comes in for the cruelest punishment. Still, although tricked into gaining weight,
stripped of her spiteful support system and eventually forced to attend
prom in a back brace, perhaps the cleverest part of McAdams’ performance
(along with Fey’s pin-sharp script) is that we don’t leave the movie
cackling at her downfall. Instead, there’s a genuine lesson in Regina’s
last-minute transformation into someone we actually care to see
redeemed, and that could only come from a performance in which the
character is inhabited as a person, rather than a cartoon character.
“It’s only funny when the sucker’s got dignity” quoth Krusty the Clown
on the philosophy of pie-throwing, but it stands for all great
pride-before-a-fall performances, and McAdams makes Regina George
simultaneously hateable, redeemable and damn funny. In a touchpoint film
littered with great performances from a cast running over with rising stars, hers might
be the powerhouse.
See Also: She doesn’t often play an
all-out baddie, but if you enjoy McAdams on cattier, more self-centered
form, Woody Allen‘s “Midnight in Paris,” which sees her reteam with her
“Wedding Crashers” co-star Owen Wilson, fits that bill. While I’m not
necessarily a huge fan of wildly overpraised film, McAdams’ turn as the
flinty, selfish and ultimately unfaithful fiance is a fun turn, if so
overladen with contrary tastes and opinions to Wilson’s Gil that you
wonder why on earth they’re together in the first place.
“Red Eye” (2005)
A perfectly formed little B-movie thriller
that’s elevated by superior direction from horror maestro Wes Craven,
“Red Eye” also boasts a great pair of central performances from McAdams
and Cillian Murphy. The actress, probably most associated with love stories, has
summoned up romantic chemistry with a variety of actors in her day,
most famously Ryan Gosling, but also Channing Tatum (“The Vow“), Owen
Wilson (“Wedding Crashers”), Michael Pena (“The Lucky Ones”) and so on,
but that talent for creating an onscreen relationship that’s more than the sum of its two parts displays
itself in other situations too. Like in this thriller setup, where
an initial frisson of attraction to Murphy’s psycho Jackson
runs through several shades of fear, anger, resolve,
and eventually rebellion and counteraction. The film is therefore at its most
effective when it keeps the two in close proximity: it’s a story told in
faces and eyes, his and hers, and is as much a demonstration of
chemistry as any clinch in the rain. And again, there’s something about
McAdams’ relatability that grounds this airborne thriller (no mean feat, considering part of the plot is an assassination attempt which will be
carried out by means of a rocket launched from a docked boat into a
hotel suite). But that’s not really the hook, which trades far
more on the simple fact that we have all at one time or another sat next
to a weirdo on a flight, and everyone who’s ever been in that situation
is suddenly aware of how very trapped you are, in a pressurized tube
thousands of feet in the air. What McAdams’ presence here demonstrates is just how much better schlocky, high-concept material can be made if
its actors commit to it as if it were Ibsen, and her performance renders it all the more scary because as ridiculous as the plot may get, we
believe her reactions and emotions, and can therefore all the more easily
imagine ourselves in her unenviable position.
See Also: “Red Eye”
was a success, but if you want to seek out McAdams in a sorta-thriller that
you probably haven’t seen, you could do worse than the weird, not-wholly
successful, slightly pastiche-y Hitchcockian riff “Married Life.” A dry
martini of a period film that stars Adams as the young lover of Chris
Cooper‘s adulterous and then murderous married man, it’s worth a
look for its great 1940s styling and McAdams as a fatale-ish blonde, but
mostly as a curious earlier work from a pre-“Keep the Lights On” and
“Love is Strange” Ira Sachs.
