Newsday's original 'Clueless' review: Fresh-faced send-up of 'Beverly Hills, 90210' is great fun

This is a lightly edited version of former Newsday film critic Jack Mathews' 3-star review of "Clueless," published on July 19, 1995.

 Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, those strange bedfellows of the Family Values Movement, ought to love Amy Heckerling's "Clueless," even though some of its teenagers acknowledge being sexually active and the kids smoking dope in one party scene appear to inhale. Because at the center of it all is Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone), a going-on-16 dream teen who loves her father, helps her friends, is kind to animals and is saving her virginity for the man she will someday love.

"Clueless," a fresh-faced send-up of the privileged world of  "Beverly Hills, 90210," is great fun, if you can stand the nonstop adolescent jargon. Paramount has included a glossary of "Clueless" blab in its press materials, 45 words and phrases that punctuate the coded language of the film's small circle of friends. It is sort of the Windows '95 version of the Dudespeak in Heckerling's 1982 hit "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

"Fast Times" was Heckerling's first film, and since then she has kept herself busy mostly with the lucrative "Look Who's Talking" franchise. With "Clueless," she returns to high school, in an excessively affluent 'burb that looks just like Beverly Hills, and introduces us to Cher, her best friend, Dionne (Stacey Dash), and Tai (Brittany Murphy), a grunge transfer from New York whom Cher and Dionne  decide to make over in their own Saks Fifth Avenue image.

Cluelessness is relative in this story. Cher, who like Dionne was  named after a great singer of the past who now does infomercials, thinks Tai is clueless because she doesn't dress the dress or talk the talk of  Bronson Alcott High. Tai doesn't even know whom to date, at least to Cher's thinking, so the boy - Mr. Wrong, it turns out - is chosen  for her. As events unfold, Cher begins to realize it is she who is clueless, about life, love and her own feelings.

If the storyline sounds vaguely familiar to you English lit majors, it comes directly from Jane Austen's 1815 novel "Emma," about a self-assured young woman of upper British society who rediscovers herself while trying to mold another woman's life. Heckerling has taken that concept, and the vagaries of upper-class snobbery, and given it a deliciously dizzy contemporary spin.

Heckerling has written some wonderfully sharp dialogue, with some cultural references (one to Billie Holiday, for instance) that will  shoot right over the heads of teenagers and tickle their parents. But it  is the marvelous deadpan performance of Silverstone, the sultry teenage vixen from "The Crush," that keeps "Clueless" from wearing out its welcome. You can only take so much beaming airheadedness, and with a cast made up entirely of caricatures, there is not enough context to engage the audience emotionally.

Silverstone has been getting the superstar-is-born treatment by the entertainment press, and "Clueless" should make it a reality. But as she did with her ensemble cast for "Fast Times," which launched the careers  of Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Heckerling showcases a couple of  other young actors we're likely to see many times again.

Stacey Dash is a stunning beauty, and Justin Walker, making his screen debut, is very funny as Christian, the outsider whose aggressive machismo conceals his true sexual orientation from no one other than the naive and infatuated Cher. That these two would end up shopping together tells it all.