There’s really no reason why making a comedy with an all female cast should be seen as a big risk for a studio to take in this day and age, but for some reason it is. Much of the talk I’ve heard about Bridesmaids leading up to its release surrounds the question of whether men will actually go to the theaters to see it, or if it will appeal to women only. The advertising for the film seemed to be very self aware of this conundrum, adding in as much raunchy humor as it could, and trying to tie this film to the wildly successful party comedy The Hangover as closely as was possible in order to appeal to the male demographic. I just don’t get where all the concern comes from. There’s a long tradition of sappy, female centric dramas coming out of Hollywood, and they’ve all done well financially. Something like Sex and the City has strong comedic elements, appeals to men in almost no way, and yet still manages to be a financial phenomenon. And the “Bromance” film, which details the friendship of a group of men, has become so popular over the past decade that it’s almost an entire genre to itself. Nobody goes into those films wondering how they are going to appeal to female audiences, so why all the concern here? I guess the question that Hollywood executives are asking is whether or not women like to laugh. Well that’s a stupid question, and if there’s anything that Bridesmaids does really well it’s to answer those that might have trepidation about this project that, yes, of course they do. And they’ll even laugh at poop jokes as long as they’re told right.
The events of Bridesmaids occur around the wedding of a man and a woman, but what the movie is really about is the friendship between two women; or more specifically, the dissolution of that friendship when class issues and an interloping Maid of Honor wannabe named Helen gets in between them. Annie (Kristen Wiig) and Lillian (Maya Rudolph) are girls from Milwaukee who have been friends since they were knee high to a colloquial cliché. They’ve been inseparable their whole lives, but now that they’re in their thirties circumstances are taking them in different directions. For Lillian, marriage and career are taking her south down the highway to the bright lights and thick pizzas of Chicago. For Annie, a failed attempt at opening a small business and a desolate dating pool are leading her to move back in with her mother. Naturally, Annie is feeling a bit like the loser who is getting left behind. This feeling is made even worse when the wealthy and fabulous Helen (Rose Byrne) starts trying to take her place as Lillian’s new best friend. She even weasels her way into taking over some of Annie’s duties as Maid of Honor, and worse, she manages to show her up at every turn. What’s a girl to do? For Wiig’s character, the answer is to go on a self-destructive rampage that leads to her being friendless, jobless, homeless, and cruel to the only guy in the world who is trying to be nice to her.
In ensemble comedies like this, a lot of whether or not the film succeeds comes down to how good the performances are. In that respect, Bridesmaids is no slouch. Wiig co-wrote and stars in this film, and surely it must be being used by Judd Apatow and its other producers as a measuring stick to see how well she fares as a leading lady. For me, the answer was pretty well. Like anybody familiar with her previous supporting and TV work probably already knows, she knocks all of the comedy out of the park. As far as the more dramatic parts go, I found her to be capable. Things get pretty bleak for Annie in this film, and while I could imagine the sadness that would have just been pouring out of her were she to be played by a great comedic actor (like a Bill Murray), Wiig doesn’t quite reach those levels of performance. She does always appear competent and comfortable living in Annie’s skin though. Her performance never really affected me emotionally, but she avoided the trap of looking like the comedienne trying desperately to act. Maya Rudolph is a comedic actress whom I feel does have those chops, and seeing as most of the poignant moments in this film were shared between Annie and Lillian, I couldn’t help but find myself thinking that this movie might have been a better fit if the roles were reversed. Maybe Rudolph is better suited to be the grounded main character that we really identify with and Wiig the slightly more eccentric friend who is there to keep things interesting. That’s not what this film was though, and for the tasks put in front of each actress, they did fine. As a matter of fact, I would say that the strongest element of this entire movie is the natural chemistry that they share. It’s a shame that the plot was mostly about events pushing them apart, because it was the moments where they were very comfortably goofing around together that I thought Bridesmaids had found something really special to build on. As the drama between their characters increased over the course of the film, these moments became too few and far between.
The supporting cast was pretty much universally good. Byrne has the perfect smug, WASPy mug to play the interloper Helen. She keeps a false smile on her face the whole time we watch her beat down and humiliate our main character, and she pulls it off well enough that we can never really blame her for the way she is. During the film’s third act she even softens just enough to become sympathetic. I feel like ten years ago this role would have went to Bridgette Wilson, and she always came off as more of a straight villain to me when playing the rich white girl. Melissa McCarthy plays the butch, burly sister of the groom Megan, and if there’s a star making performance in this film, it came from her. Like Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover, McCarthy steals this film by fearlessly foisting her foibles at the camera and providing most of the real belly laughs it has to offer. And while I recognize her from her work on The Gilmore Girls, she played a profoundly different character there and I’m sure a lot of people are going to be wondering where this hilarious woman came from after coming out of this one. Reno 911’s Wendi McLevon-Covey and The Office’s Ellie Kemper round out the main crew of bridesmaids, and while both are funny ladies, and they both get a handful of funny lines, their inclusion in this film felt a little half-baked. I can’t even remember what their relationships to the other characters were. Both seem to have been added to the film to break things up and add a little window dressing, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, I would have liked to see them get something a more substantial to work with.
One thing that might have been excised to give those characters more focus is the romantic subplot. While all of these wedding mishaps are going on, Annie’s character is periodically off in other locations exploring a budding relationship with a police officer named Rhodes. He’s played by Chris O’Dowd, who was charmingly vulnerable in the role and came off as quite likable. He effortlessly gets you rooting for his character as he tries to woo Annie, and watching his plight was some of the most effective stuff in the film. But everything going on between the two characters felt like it was from another movie. The main wedding plot and this romantic sub plot never intersect, and they feel like they’re taking away from each other’s momentum as the film’s focus flips back and forth between the two. In addition, the romantic stuff was mostly about Rhodes’ doing what he could to get Annie’s attention while she continued to be oblivious to him and her own feelings. If this relationship needed to be explored, it would have made more sense to do it from the perspective of Rhodes’ character; but this isn’t O’Dowd’s movie, it’s Wiig’s. Bridesmaids might have worked better if it jettisoned the romance and stuck to being a female interpretation of the modern Bromance.
Where the film really works is during its big comedy numbers. There is a sequence involving food poisoning during a dress fitting that had the crowd I saw this with in hysterics. They went for a huge amount of raunch here and it really paid off. I got the sense that nobody in the audience was expecting this film to go so far, yet they were delighted that it did. Similarly, there is an airplane freak out scene later on that works almost as well. What goes down is big, and crazy, and unbelievable; but the girls are all funny enough to make it stick. Every time Bridesmaids went to crazy places, I felt an immediate response from the people around me. But, conversely, I found myself getting bored in the smaller, more dramatic moments. Wiig plays a flawed character who has a downfall, learns a lesson, and then experiences a comeback; and that’s essential to the structure of a comedy, but it felt like we spent far too much time in the downfall portion of that structure. Her character hits rock bottom pretty early in the film’s second act, and then just stays there for quite a while up until the very end. After a while it felt less like the establishing of stakes, and more like wallowing in misery. For a straight comedy that relies so heavily on outrageous antics for its appeal, I think it should have went after the light, breezy stuff much sooner than it did. By the time Annie started putting her life back together she had sulked for so long that I had started to dislike her. And that’s poison for the audience’s emotional investment because Annie does some pretty horrible things that you’re asked to forgive her of.
So, as a man, I would say that I responded to a comedy about female relationships in a lukewarm manner. The people marketing this movie tried to sell me on the fact that seeing this would be no different than a similar movie with an all male cast doing all male things, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. Bridesmaids concerned itself with fancy parties and the politics of throwing them far too much for my tastes; but that didn’t mean I didn’t still laugh during the big moments. The way Annie and Helen interact with one another was hugely passive aggressive, and it started to irritate me after a while. In a comedy for men the interaction would have been far more aggressive-aggressive, and I would have probably related to the intricacies of the relationships better; but that didn’t mean I totally tuned out during all of the character stuff. There are differences between men and women, and it makes no sense to ignore them. Just because I don’t relate to everything going on up on the screen doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be interested in seeing a movie. Everybody likes to laugh, and when you zing an audience with a clever quip or a well-timed poop joke, they’re going to give you that response no matter what gender they are, or what gender the characters up on the screen happen to be. When Bridesmaids concentrates on just getting laughs, it really worked for me. When it dwelled too long in depression about failed bakeries and the politics of female friendships, it kind of lost me. That’s chick stuff, man. But I think a lot of girls are really going to love this one.
