By Joe Morgenstern
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
May 13, 2011
If this is only a chick flick, then call me a chick. Witty, raunchy and affecting, "Bridesmaids" crosses boundaries by blithely ignoring them. At one moment it's a broad-gauge farce that examines sex from a woman's point of view. (The findings are mixed at best.) At another it's a sophisticated comedy of manners, and class, that pits two bridesmaids against each other for control of the wedding, if not the bride's destiny. Through it all—the free-form conversations, the brilliant set pieces, the preposterous gross-outs, the flawless performances—Kristen Wiig's forlorn maid of honor, Annie, seeks her own destiny with a wrenchingly cockeyed passion.
A woman's point of view is one of the film's great distinctions. The screenplay was written by Ms. Wiig and Annie Mumolo—both women are wise in the ways of improv, as well as TV—and directed with extraordinary finesse by Paul Feig, who created the TV series "Freaks and Geeks." As a man, though, I'd say its greatest distinction is its inclusiveness, and I'm not using that sticky term to be PC. The filmmakers and their producer, Judd Apatow, see the comedy genre as including all sorts of quirks and qualities that make us human—effusiveness, obtuseness, tenderness, fury, delicacy, idiocy, eloquence. Their characters cannot stop talking. A bad thing? No, a great thing, because the talk is so smart. They've staged the best highway sobriety test since "The Man With Two Brains," turned baked goods to the best romantic advantage since "Waitress." And the movie's Mr. Right couldn't be odder, or righter.
The bride, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is forlorn in her own way. She knows her impending marriage will distance her from Annie, her best friend since childhood. She also knows that her wedding plans are being hijacked by the richest and pushiest of her bridesmaids, the ethereally insufferable Helen (a beautifully measured performance by Rose Byrne).
The Annie-Helen rivalry fuels much of the plot. It starts slowly and slyly at a celebratory party, with rival speeches that keep on going and building and getting funnier. That seems to be the script's organizing principle—first do this, then add that, then top it, then push it a little higher and keep it going as long as there's something to build on. The result isn't organized all that well—a few scenes misfire and the whole thing goes on a bit too long. (The film might have done with less, or with none, of Annie's grotesque English roommates; they're built on nothing but arbitrary notions.) That said, though, the wonder is how often "Bridesmaids" reaches the heights and sustains the altitude.
A sweetly ridiculous riff with a radar speed gun builds on repetition and expectation—how many cars will it take before…? (I can't resist describing some of this delicious stuff, but I'm not going to spoil it with details.) A tennis game turns savage. Belching forth from nowhere, a gastric event grows too ghastly for words. A gathering of bridesmaids on a flight to Vegas out-airplanes "Airplane!" as it rises to pure—and I use the word advisedly—pandemonium. Each bridesmaid has her daft appeal, though none is as genuinely crazed—or outrageously entertaining—as Melissa McCarthy's Megan, a creature of formidable girth and unstoppable id. (Annie's mother is played by the late Jill Clayburgh, an actress and comedienne whose career constituted an anthology of lovely performances.)
At the heart of the film is poor, desperate Annie, who lost the bakery she had opened just as the economy tanked, and has yet to find herself as a fully functioning adult. Her car is a wreck, though it's a Lamborghini compared to her love life, which centers on a smarmy Narcissus who treats her like a consumer product that's both disposable and renewable. (It's a tribute to the filmmakers' verve that they've kept the sex scenes funny—extremely funny—since what we're seeing is sheer self-abasement.) Ms. Wiig's first starring role on the big screen is a sensation; how could it have taken so long? She is wistful but never tearful in the worst of Annie's turmoil, intensely likable without trying to be, unfailingly interesting and, in her big moments—one of which involves a giant cookie—a paragon of antic energy.
Then there's the man behind the radar gun, a cop named Rhodes who's played to perfection by Chris O'Dowd. (It's an inspired piece of casting.) "The cop talks weird," Annie's Porsche-driving lover observes at one point, and so he does. He talks with a pleasing accent: Mr. O'Dowd is Irish. He speaks with gentle humor and unforced wisdom, whether he's citing Annie for dysfunctional tail lights, or confronting her, to her confusion and dismay, with indisputable evidence of her competence. Rhodes doesn't play a huge role in the proceedings, but he's worth citing as evidence of the movie's excellence. Here's a man, written by women, who is both a fantasy figure—this is wedding comedy, after all, not kitchen realism—and a convincingly endearing original. "Bridesmaids" gets at so many things with deceptive ease and startling skill—women's anger, the loneliness of the single life, the marriage trap, the pain of sex along with the joy, but also friendship, sanity and a vision of love.
Deflating That Big, Puffy White Gown
By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
May 12, 2011
NYT Critics Pick
That may sound disgusting, perfect for the reigning naughty boys of American screens, and it is, a little. Yet the worst is only implied, and given how most wedding pictures enforce the hoariest clichés about the sexes, the go-for-broke outlandishness of Lillian’s pratfall — nicely handled by the director Paul Feig, holding the shot as she sits in a deflated puff of white — is welcome. In most wedding movies an actress may have the starring part (though not always), but it’s only because her character’s function is to land a man rather than to be funny. Too many studio bosses seem to think that a woman’s place is in a Vera Wang.
There is a big dress here, of course, an aggressively foolish Gordian knot of silk and wit that slyly speaks to how women need (and want) to be packaged as brides, dolled up in satin and all but lost in a cloud of tulle and the appreciative din of family and friends. The movie doesn’t push hard in that direction — more than anything, Ms. Wiig and Ms. Mumolo want to make you giggle and snort — but they get at the layers of insanity in weddings as well as the joys. They ask the question facing every modern woman who jumps at the chance to enact the latter-day equivalent of being passed from man to man, father to husband, if without a bushel of dowry corn and 12 goats: How do you survive getting down the aisle?
With a little, or rather a lot, of help from your friends, or so say the filmmakers, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till misunderstanding, jealousy, other people or just life us do part. To that intimate end, Lillian, after announcing her engagement, asks Annie (Ms. Wiig) to be her maid of honor. Best friends since childhood, the two are still tight, but Lillian’s news throws Annie, who, after her cake shop has gone under, is struggling with her crummy job, junker car, weird roommates, everything. She isn’t with anyone, though the hot stuff played by Jon Hamm, playfully riffing on his persona as the thinking woman’s brute, figures into her life with humor and almost too-true pathos.
And so Annie screws up again and again, giving parties that fail and insults that don’t. Along with the other bridesmaids — an excellent Melissa McCarthy and the very fine Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper — Lillian and Annie laugh, cry, hurl and board a plane to Vegas to test the bonds of friendship en route to a hangover of their own. There’s a guy on the side, too (Chris O’Dowd), but he’s so nice that cranky, complaining Annie almost doesn’t notice. A lanky-limbed blonde who evokes Meg Ryan stretched along Olive Oyl lines, Ms. Wiig keeps her features jumping and sometimes bunching. She’s a funny, pretty woman, but she’s also a comedian, and she’s wonderfully confident about playing not nice.
It would be easy to oversell “Bridesmaids,” though probably easier if also foolish to do the reverse. It isn’t a radical movie (even if Ms. McCarthy’s character comes close); it’s formally unadventurous; and there isn’t much to look at beyond all these female faces. Yet these are great faces, and the movie is smart about a lot of things, including the vital importance of female friendships. And it’s nice to see so many actresses taking up space while making fun of something besides other women. Perhaps the biggest, most pleasurable surprise is that “Bridesmaids” doesn’t treat Annie’s single status as a dire character flaw worthy of triage: she’s simply going through a rough patch and has to figure things out, as in real life.
Ms. Wiig, a longtime cast member of “Saturday Night Live,” and Ms. Mumolo, a veteran of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, know what female moviegoers want: honest laughs with, and not solely about, women. Contra Christopher Hitchens and his 2007 assertion in Vanity Fair that women are not funny, they offer irrefutable proof that along with producing and starring in a hit TV series (thank you, Tina Fey), women can go aggressive laugh to aggressive-and-absurd laugh with men. All they need, beyond talent and timing, a decent director and better lines, is a chance. It helps if the director has a clue, and if everyone involved sees women not just as bosoms with legs, but as bosoms with legs and brains.
“Bridesmaids” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Raucous jokes and salty language.
BRIDESMAIDS
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Paul Feig; written by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig; director of photography, Robert Yeoman; edited by William Kerr and Mike Sale; music by Michael Andrews; production design by Jefferson Sage; costumes by Leesa Evans; produced by Judd Apatow, Clayton Townsend and Barry Mendel; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.
WITH: Kristen Wiig (Annie), Maya Rudolph (Lillian), Rose Byrne (Helen), Wendi McLendon-Covey (Rita), Ellie Kemper (Becca), Melissa McCarthy (Megan), Chris O’Dowd (Officer Rhodes) and Jon Hamm (Ted).
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