It’s funny how the decision to get married can send shockwaves through your family and circle of friends, prompting major lifestyle changes and contradicting firm beliefs. It’s almost like popping the question puts you on the same level as a terrorist setting off a bomb. Once the decision is made, you better be ready for what comes next – there will be casualties, the repercussions will be traumatic, and you might even soil your wedding dress.
Bridesmaids reunites Saturday Night Live comedienne Kristen Wiig (most recently seen in Paul) with foul-mouthed comedy’s producer extraordinaire Judd Apatow, who has tickled our funny bone and tested our gag reflex in everything from The 40 Year Old Virgin to Get Him to the Greek. This time the principal cast is female, we hardly ever see the groom, and there is scene after scene of female bonding by way of bitchy outbursts and teary-eyed apologies – but don’t assume it’s your standard leave-your-boyfriend-at-the-door chick flick. In fact, Bridesmaids is so shamelessly disgusting and over the top that it may send the Farrelly brothers back to the drawing board.
Wiig plays the perennially unlucky Annie, broke and lonely in the wake of a stillborn business enterprise. A magnet for successful but egotistical men, she sacrifices whatever self-esteem she has left justifying the damage she inflicts on herself through these meaningless encounters to her best friend Lillian (fellow SNL regular Maya Rudolph). Annie needs something to happen that will break her out of her rut, and like any best friend would, Lillian provides it when she announces her engagement and invites Annie to be her maid of honour.
Enter the bridesmaids. If you’ve seen a few of Apatow’s films (and by now who hasn’t?), you’ll know that it’s the seasoned comedians playing the lead’s mates who, even while struggling with stereotypes, always add some flavour and bite to the proceedings, as the bridesmaids fail to see eye to eye on the wedding plans. There’s the picture perfect princess, the inexperienced girl next door, the unhappily married blonde yearning for a second chance, and the overweight and seriously twisted sister-in-law – a brave performance by Melissa McCarthy, who pulls out all the stops in the kind of role that Zach Galifianakis has built a career on. In fact, you could almost describe the film as a female Hangover, the film which made a star of Galifianakis; the basic premise of everything going wrong in the lead-up to a wedding in this case prompted by the rivalry between Annie and the other best friend, Helen (the luminous Sydney-born Rose Byrne, also in the upcoming Insidious).
But the tone and a certain lack of focus reduces Bridemaids to a bedfellow of the Farrelly brothers’ less accomplished Hall Pass. The nasty fun is weighted in the first half, while the latter half becomes increasingly trite and conventional, culminating in an all-too-easy wrap-up. The irreverence of the gross-out gags is again rather incongruous with this shift into sugary optimism. But at the same time, it does achieve a little more resonance than a film like Hall Pass, anchored by star and co-writer Wiig’s credible and sympathetic performance. If Seth Rogen is Judd Apatow’s joker, Wiig is undoubtedly his droll and charming queen.
- Review first published May 9th, 2011.
