Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997)

Romy and Michele's High School Reunion is a 1997 comedy about two women who fabricate careers as the inventors of Post-It notes for their ten-year reunion. The film is a female-led buddy comedy with two women as co-protagonists, which counts for something in its era. The cast, however, is uniformly white, and the film makes no diversity-conscious gestures. Alan Cumming appears, but his Sandy Frink is a straight romantic interest and carries no queer content. The social awareness here is ambient at best. The film watches status anxiety in white suburban Arizona without asking who gets excluded from that suburb.

That female friendship is the film's mild progressive pulse. Romy and Michele reject male approval, outgrow the status-obsessed clique, and choose each other. The treatment is light comedy, not an articulated statement. Body positivity surfaces in Michele's memory of being an overweight child taunted at school. The film sympathizes with feeling out of place, then moves on. The anti-capitalist material is similarly faint: a borrowed Jaguar, fabricated careers, a gentle satire of status, and a final celebration of entrepreneurial success. Race, climate, neurodivergence, and historical revision get nothing. The film is contemporary, apolitical, and mostly interested in jokes about fashion and Post-It notes.

The moral arrives late and lightly. Be yourself, the film says, but it says so through plot resolution instead of sermonizing. That restraint is the saving grace. The film has heart, a cult following, and no interest in lecturing its audience. It is a comedy of manners for people who have not thought about high school in years. The cultural awareness is low, the jokes are silly, and the whole enterprise remains amiable. A reasonable classification: pleasant, period-specific, and only accidentally progressive.