Paul Feig (2011)
Bridesmaids was seen by some critics as an historic fusion of male grossout movies and chick flicks. This is almost entirely because of the sequence in a high-end bridal shop. Food poisoning grips the girls in a fanfare of farts, a tumult of throwing up and diarrhetic explosions. The episode culminates in the bride-to-be rushing into the street, sinking to the ground in the capacious white wedding dress she was trying on, and shitting herself. The essence-of-fragrant-femininity setting – the threat of the damage that upset stomachs might do to the pristine furnishings and costumes – makes this excremental showstopper almost perfectly symbolic of what the producer Judd Apatow, the writers Annie Mumolo and Kirsten Wiig, and the director Paul Feig, have been praised for doing in Bridesmaids but it’s just about the only grossness in the picture. (I’m not complaining about that.) The bride is Lillian (Maya Rudolph). The central character in the story is her childhood friend Annie (Kirsten Wiig), the current man in whose life is a self-admiring user called Ted (Jon Hamm). Annie’s bakery business went bust, she’s now a sales assistant in a jewellery store and her cynicism is such that she can’t help telling lovestruck customers that the good times won’t last. Lillian asks Annie to be her maid of honour. Another of the bridesmaids is Helen (Rose Byrne), the fatuously glamorous, control freak wife of Lillian’s fiancé’s boss. From the moment they meet at Lillian’s engagement party, Annie and Helen are at loggerheads with the latter trying to take charge of the wedding preparations.
The film is clever. It alternates between comedy set pieces – Annie and Helen’s spiralling eulogy competition at the engagement party, Annie making a scene on the plane taking the girls on a bachelorette trip to Las Vegas, Annie trashing the elaborate bridal shower Helen arranges for Lillian – and more realistic conversations between pairs of characters, chiefly Annie, Lillian, the latter’s prospective sister-in-law Megan (Melissa McCarthy) and an amiable highway patrolman called Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd), who pulls Annie in for broken tail lights on her car but soon realises that he’s attracted to her. These conversations, although they maintain a comic tone, are played in a style that encourages people to think Bridesmaids contains ‘truthful’ human elements under the exuberant comedy. That’s an attractive combination and there’s no difficulty understanding why the film was such a hit but I had problems with it. First, something the film-makers can’t help: the big social events that precede the wedding itself. Bridesmaids does satirise what a huge production number getting married has become but it does so only through exaggeration of the engagement party and bridal shower proceedings. It doesn’t suggest that these required rituals aren’t integral to matrimony, whereas the very idea of them scares me. Second, the character of Annie: the structure of the story demands that things have to keep getting worse for her until the inevitable recovery starts but the setbacks go on for so long and Annie gets so pissed off that, likeable though Kirsten Wiig is, she becomes tedious. The pep talk that Megan delivers to Annie, which is not just verbally candid but physically aggressive, is very welcome. Third, the eventual comic payoffs – the dismissal of the jerk Ted, the capitulation of bossy Helen (who seems back to nearly normal by the time the wedding actually happens) – aren’t what they might be, especially given how long you’re kept waiting for them. (Bridesmaids would have been better if it had lost ten or fifteen of its 125 minutes.)
The quietness of the scenes featuring Chris O’Dowd as Rhodes is, from an early stage, a relief. As the film goes on, Rhodes is increasingly distinctive and simpatico because things matter to him: when Annie, after they’ve slept together, offends him, it takes Rhodes time to get over the hurt. Elsewhere, the lack of emotional residue becomes problematic and this is because the actors are able to suggest real people. Maya Rudolph in particular makes Lillian essentially believable and down to earth so that you don’t believe she would accept as readily as she seems to all the froth and hype around the wedding (or easily forget the trauma of crapping in the street). I know this may seem to be taking Bridesmaids too seriously but you can’t have it both ways – that is, have the cast doing real yet treat whatever happens as weightless because it’s-only-a-comedy. Melissa McCarthy’s performance won deserved praise – she plays the abrasively eccentric Megan staight and true and, as a result, she’s also very funny. The two other bridesmaids – the jaded, foul-mouthed Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey) and the dimly naive Becca (Ellie Kemper) – are there to make up the numbers and character contrasts. Although the part of Ted is thin, Jon Hamm is better in it than he has been in other big screen roles: he seems more comfortable when there’s a sexual arrogance to the character he’s playing. It’s both enjoyable and sad to see Jill Clayburgh, in her last screen role (she died before the film was released), evidently having a good time as Annie’s droll mother. Tim Heidecker has an agreeable ordinariness as the groom-to-be. He and Melissa McCarthy are amusingly right as brother and sister. Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson are the unlovely siblings who are Annie’s flatmates. McCarthy’s real-life husband Ben Falcone is the federal air marshal who ends up in Megan’s bed. Mitch Silpa is excellent in the small part of a flight attendant who keeps his temper with fine sarcastic control.
11 June 2014
