90's Watch: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997)

Watched:  03/22/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  David Mirkin

I have no notes.

This movie is hilarious from start to finish, is incredibly well written, well directed and has a cast that gets the assignment - starting with our two leads, to every supporting character.  It's not Citizen Kane, but that's also not the goal.  It's a flick that barely has any commentary and is just a situation with characters intended to derive comedy.  And that it does.

I have no idea if people saw this in the theater (we did, back in college).  But I assume everyone has since seen this since streaming or on basic cable.  If not, fix your heart and see Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997).  

If it's been a minute - Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) are living in LA, hitting der clerb, and kind of drifting around but having a good time.  Heather, a former classmate (Janeane Garofolo), runs into Romy and informs her that there's a high school reunion of their school in Tucson.  Romy and Michele want to go, but slowly realize that maybe they haven't had the most productive ten years by many folks' measure.  

Of course, old crushes will be there, and folks who crushed on them (Alan Cumming and Justin Theroux).  And the mean girls from high school.  So, our heroes decide they need to come up with a story that will impress.

All of this is *just* before the internet really proliferated through the public, which would happen kind of starting in late 1997 or early 1998 (that's when I remember airlines going online).  So there's no concept of a dot-com millionaire.  Or looking up information with a few keystrokes.  But it still works, and works well as a comedy.

The biggest problem with the movie, and this is a YMMV item, is that the movie posits that Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino aren't stunning - they're supposedly not the pretty ones.  And the movie suggests that their sense of fashion isn't amazing - and it is (well done, Mona May, Costume Designer), or that what they're wearing is somehow not great - and it is.  

The fun is that it's a movie told in hyperbole, everything turned up two notches from reality in the best way.  And it has the cajones to run for several minutes in what turns out to be an extended dream sequence - which may also be the closest such sequence to actually replicate the vibe of dreaming I've ever seen in a movie.  Sorry, David Lynch.  

I know she hasn't gone anywhere, and one can still find Mira Sorvino working, but I'm surprised she didn't emerge in this century as more of a powerhouse.  Kudrow was already famous from Friends and has had numerous high profile successes.  It just seems like Sorvino was back-burnered - but that was kind of what happened to women after 2-4 years of stardom at the time.  I guess that Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite was supposed to be enough. 

Anyway, at the time I saw this I was only 4 years out of high school, and I wasn't thinking too much yet about whether or not I'd impress anyone when I showed up for my 10 year reunion (in the end, I had no interest in going, and have never been to an official reunion).  But I do like the notion of repositioning the past, as Michele does for Romy at the film's end.  "Hey, we were okay.  It didn't matter then and doesn't matter now what anyone else was doing" kinda lands.