Bridesmaids was great!
Now we're talking! Bridesmaids was the much needed answer to my question of when were we going to get a good breakout summer comedy again? 2010 was anemic. Maybe people were just too depressed by the recession to laugh. Bridesmaids provides laughs while not casting a blind eye to the recession.
Kristen Wiig, who for years has stolen scenes in cameos and supporting roles in comedies, finally gets herself a lead role. And even as movies have a hard time seeming current with the one year delay between shooting and release, this film did a pretty darn good job of feeling up to the moment. Wiig plays Annie, a jewelry store clerk. She had owned and operated a bakery in downtown Milwaukee. But it became a casualty of the economy, as revenue could not keep up with the overhead costs, even as she is fantastic at what she does, as is evidenced by a scene where she goes to great ornate detail to bake and decorate a single cupcake at her apartment. Nevertheless, all of her investments tied up in her business went down with the foreclosure, so she's terrified of trying again to make a living out of the baked goods industry, and she's extremely reluctant even to bake for fun.
Annie's love life is an exploration in self-destruction. She engages in one-night stands with the superficial Ted (Jon Hamm), who really has no emotional need for her, and it is, to him, the quintessential no-strings-attached friendship with benefits. Annie likes him, though, and is quietly crestfallen when he indicates, in prime comic jerk fashion, that she has reached the limit of the time he has budgeted to spend with her.
Annie's relationship history stands in direct contrast to her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), who is about to get married, and by all accounts appears to be in love with her fiancé, Dougie. Annie and Lillian are clearly peas in a pod, a female version of Blake and me. Their friendship spans years and years, to the point where they communicate readily with each other, and it's obvious through their impulses, gestures and projected moods that they're able to respond to each other's thoughts and feelings by means that transcend the dialogue itself. This is accomplished because Rudolph and Wiig have worked together so long, and having seen them act on SNL together from 2005-2009, I can sense that they brought their sense of implied history right into these characters; and that's fine! Anne and Lillian speak in inside jokes, and just watching them bantor we know they can see into each others' minds. Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise had a similar dynamic when I saw Apollo 13, because you really believed, based in their performances, that Jim Lovell and Ken Mattingly went way back, as carry-over from them playing Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan.
Lillian and Dougie's engagement party sets the movie on its course. While Annie is not jealous of Lillian's good fortune, it does make her feel more sorry for herself. This does not mean, however, that the engagement party is devoid of a jealous stand-off.
The engagement party is hosted by Lillian's boss' wife, Helen, who as it turns out has become pretty good friends with Lillian herself. When Helen makes the toast, she thanks Lillian for being such a good friend, and expresses that she's able to tell her things she's never told anyone else. Helen clearly is eager to please Lillian, and Annie's immediate feelings of inferiority manifest themselves through her compulsive addendum to add to the toast. A hilarious battle of wills ensues, but it's so funny because it's true. When your best friend gets another friend, and they seem to go and develop an emotional bond that exceeds that which they share with you, you suddenly feel threatened. This set the tone for the film, written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo, and directed by Paul Feig (I see his name on The Office regularly); Annie is a fish out of water as the wedding planning proceeds in layers of decadence like a metaphorical cake that gets only more ornate with each tier.
Anne, frustrated with Helen and her instant bond with her best friend, does impressions of Helen while driving home from the engagement party. This causes some erratic driving, which gets her pulled over by a state trooper Nathan (Chris O'Dowd), who is ready to write hre up for a traffic violation. However, she manages to sort of charm him with her walking the straight line, and with her history as a baker.
Anne is at a moment in her life where she feels reticent to do what her true passion is, which is to bake, and yet she resents that her friends have so many more options than she does. Anne rents a room with a British brother and sister, and has her present job at the jeweler only because her mom is her boss' AA sponsor. Annie's mom (Jill Claybourgh) constantly dotes on her about her love life, and it's really funny to see how a woman in her mid thirties is still subject to the same helicopter parenting as a teenager or child.
Anne becomes increasingly desperate throughout the film to assert herself as a presence in her friend Lillian's life, because she is clearly not having as significant of sway in the wedding planning as Helen. Annie, who we have to remind ourselves is the maid of honor, makes a suggestion for a shorter skirt, which is admittedly the tacker of the options, while Helen opts for a more elegant model, which is of course the far more expensive option. Annie can't afford the more expensive dress, at least without asking for help, nor can she afford first-class for a posh destination bachelorette party without, as mentioned, asking for help. She starts to feel less and less relevant in Lillian's life, and we really start to connect to her sense of futility as Lillian is reasonably bound to show gratitude for Helen's seemingly endless hospitality.
When it comes to selecting a place for the bridesmaids to eat, Annie feels compelled to choose the lunch destination, the Churra Chi, an obscure Brazilian restaurant in a working-class Milwaukee neighborhood. Lillian vouches for her friend's choice, even as Helen clearly would prefer a more elegant option. What happens as a result of this food decision? Well, the symptoms of gastroenteritis start to become all too clear in Annie, Lillian, as well as fellow bridesmaids Becca (Ellie Kemper), Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and Megan (Melissa McCarthy). It becomes a mad dash for the bathroom as they all need to either throw up or have diahrreah. Yes, the scene is as funny as it sounds on paper. This scene is stolen by the bride, though, who...(pausing to laugh out loud)....has the problem of making a bowel movement in a frilly wedding dress!
Annie is a disaster on two legs, and yet she's a good person. A complement of sorts is provided to her through state trooper Nathan, who she proceeds to run into on the highway and at the gas station. Nathan gets her, and a very nice friendship evolves, leaving the audience positively begging for it to transcend to something a little more serious. Nathan isn't as devastatingly handsome as Ted, but that's fine, that prevents him from being a total douchebag. In fact, he not only doesn't indicate that he wants her to leave after their first night of no-strings-attached lovemaking, he actually sets up ingredients for a cake in his kitchen and invites her to bake!
Annie doesn't feel quite confident enough in herself, though, and maybe her terse attitude towards Nathan is an external terseness towards herself; she doesn't feel like she's deserving of the positive lifestyle change he provides, or at least represents.
Annie will, in her ambivalence towards romance and her dogged ambition towards friendship, bring herself to the brink of total failure. And even as she continues to do damage to herself and everyone around her, we can't help but look through things from her side and ache for her. Her slow motion trainwreck includes a drunken tirade on a flight to Las Vegas, a spectacular meltdown at a wedding shower, hosted by (who else) Helen, an eviction, employment termination, and as if she wasn't landing far enough off her feet already, car trouble, where when in need of a lift, instead of calling Nathan, she calls Ted.
While this may seem like too much personal trauma for one movie, Kristen Wiig sells it to us. Mike Myers did it in Wayne's World, Chris Farley did it in Tommy Boy. With the aforementioned movies in mind, Bridesmaids evokes the very best SNL-cast movies of the past three and a half decades. And it matches its lunacy with sincerity without coming across as too cloying, though it dares to come close.
Is there a future for Annie and Lillian now that Helen has not only similar interests to her, but the money to go out and do the great things that they've always wanted to? Can Annie pull herself together enough to know that a history of being there for someone speaks for itself? If only Annie can swallow her pride, she just might grasp that there's space for her in Lillian's new life of opportunities if she can just accommodate for the perhaps over-the-top, overcompensating presence of Helen. While her lifestyle and her invitation of posh adventure may seem materialistic and fundamentally unnecessary to Annie and Lillian, given their humble origins, it is borne of a woman who is eager to please, and may just care as much about making people happy as showing off.
While Melissa McCarthy provided some hilarious comic relief as Megan, and Rose Byrne certainly stole some scenes as Helen, the towering performance of the movie was Kristen Wiig, who was fearlessly funny and painfully human.
Bridesmaids more than made up for Hangover 2. It's perhaps the best comedies of the summer, and perhaps one of the best films of the year. It's made a handsome amount of money; now if only the Golden Globes can serve to catch it some fire come awards season.
Three and 3/4 stars.
Here are my favorite Saturday Night Live cast movies so far.
1. Wayne's World
2. Bridesmaids
3. Groundhog Day
4. Big Daddy
5. The Wedding Singer
6. Mean Girls
7. Coneheads!
8. Caddyshack
9. Anchorman
10. Tommy Boy
Also enjoyed:
Daddy Day Care
Austin Powers
National Lampoon's Vacation
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters 2
Stripes
Wayne's World 2
Need to finish:
Animal House
Blues Brothers