Heathers

Daniel Waters wrote Heathers as an answer to the John Hughes school of teenage film, in which the popular girl learns humility and the outsider gets the boy by the last dance. Waters keeps the furniture, the cafeteria, the jocks, the ruling clique, the sympathetic teacher, and asks what would happen if somebody started killing people. Michael Lehmann, directing his first feature, shoots it in colours a child would pick. It is a comedy, it is 103 minutes long, and for most of them it is as sharp and as nasty as the genre has ever been. Then it loses its nerve. We recommend it warmly, with that one reservation, and we will come to it.

Rudy Dillon dresses the three Heathers by colour: red for Heather Chandler, green for Heather Duke, yellow for Heather McNamara, with Veronica in blue and grey, so that the pecking order at the lunch table is legible before anyone speaks. Francis Kenny shoots Westerburg High through wide lenses that stretch the corridors and turn the croquet lawn the green of a lawn in an advert; the school looks like somebody’s dream of a teen film. Jon Hutman gives the Heathers’ houses big pale rooms with nothing on the walls. David Newman’s score tinkles like a music box tuned a shade flat, and Norman Hollyn opens the picture with the croquet game in slow motion, mallets coming down beside a head buried up to the neck in the lawn.

Winona Ryder plays Veronica as the only person at Westerburg who is embarrassed about Westerburg. She delivers Waters’s lines, “What’s your damage, Heather?”, as if she has just heard herself say them and is not sure she approves. Christian Slater’s J.D. is the other thing everyone remembers: a new boy in a long coat who plays every line as though it were the end of a scene. Slater makes him funny first, then attractive, then something else, and the film is careful about the order. Kim Walker’s Heather Chandler is on screen for less time than her name suggests and rules the picture regardless; she says “Grow up” the way other people say “Get out”. Shannen Doherty, as Heather Duke, watches the throne with a face of open appetite.

By the half-hour mark Westerburg is one Heather short, and the school’s grief lasts roughly until lunch. The film’s real subject is not murder. It is the speed with which the adults, Penelope Milford’s Pauline Fleming and Glenn Shadix’s Father Ripper chief among them, turn a dead teenager into a lesson, a ceremony and a chance to be on television. We laughed out loud at the first funeral, and then Fleming got the cafeteria holding hands in front of a news crew and the laugh curdled. We think Waters meant it to. The film is angrier at the grown-ups than at J.D., and it is right to be.

The ending is the trouble, and most critics agree with us, so we are claiming no courage. In the last twenty minutes the film that has spent an hour and a half refusing to be a lesson turns round and delivers one. We will not describe it. The sting goes out of the picture and you can watch it reaching for a softer landing than it has earned. There are dated things too. The jocks’ slurs are there to indict the jocks, but there are more of them than the point needs, and the running joke about a pop song on teenage suicide by a fictional band called Big Fun is made three times when once would have done.

Against the films it is mocking it stands up better than most of them. Hughes gave American teenagers a way of talking they had never actually talked; Waters does the same, “How very”, “Lick it up, baby”, and the difference is that his teenagers are lying, and know it. Thirty-odd years on the Hughes films look like the strange ones.

The 18 certificate is correct. This is a film about children for people who are no longer children. Watch it with someone who sat at the wrong lunch table. They will laugh in different places from you, and in one or two places they will not laugh at all.