Bridesmaids, the first female buddy comedy from producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up and countless others over the last half-decade), stars Kristen Wiig, that passive-aggressive skinny blonde on Saturday Night Live. It’s been marketed to film critics as the definitive response to Christopher Hitchens’s 2007 contention in Vanity Fair that women aren’t funny.
For reasons of ideological conformity, reviewers are antsy over how cinema has been male-dominated for decades. At the movie theater in Van Nuys, the girl in front of us in line for the box office happily described to her date the potential merits of their seeing Something Borrowed, Water for Elephants, or Jumping the Broom. Then he put $23 down for two tickets to Fast Five. He pays, he picks.
Bridesmaids never came up in their discussion. It’s not really a Van Nuys movie. Sure, it has gross-out laughs combined with Apatow’s (annoyingly sensible) moral didacticism. Nevertheless, like most Apatow movies, it’s aimed at roughly the upper third of the market. The mass audience wants wish fulfillment, while the college-educated crowd likes frustration and irony, which Wiig certainly delivers.
She plays Annie, a Milwaukee chef whose life is falling apart because her hipster downtown bakery went broke in the recession. Now she has to share an apartment with, inexplicably, a brother-sister pair of hostile, obese near-albinos from England. Apatow has the fat blonde girl do a dead-on impression of tall, dark Russell Brand, smug star of the producer’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek.
Worse, the heroine’s lifelong best friend, played by Maya Rudolph, is getting her life in order. She announces her engagement to an upwardly mobile Chicagoan and asks the already stressed Annie to organize the formal events.
Rudolph has been a terrific utility infielder for Saturday Night Live for a decade because—as the daughter of the late soul singer Minnie Riperton and Dick Rudolph, a close friend of Gwyneth Paltrow’s dad—she can play black or white. (In 2006, Rudolph was black in Idiocracy and white in A Prairie Home Companion.) In Bridesmaids, however, the reliable sketch comedienne is merely asked to play a character much like herself—the sweet-natured daughter of an affluent black-white couple—which doesn’t leave her much to do.
Wiig’s Annie feels threatened in her position of Best Friend Forever by Rudolph’s character’s new pal, the bride’s fiancé’s boss’ second wife. (Got that? Male viewers will bemoan the lack of family-tree diagrams.) Rose Byrne plays a Chicago society lady who is prettier, richer, and much better organized than Annie from Milwaukee. Bored, she wants to stage a coup and overthrow Annie as chief planner.
It’s refreshing to see a movie where women compete not over a man, but, realistically, over social status among women. On the other hand, you can see why most chick flicks don’t go this route. In Bridesmaids, the stakes are low and it’s hard to care who will get to organize the wedding shower. Why not let the rich Chicago lady do the work?
There is an interesting parallel between the two rivals and their hometowns. America used to be full of prosperous mid-sized industrial cities such as Milwaukee. But in winner-take-all 21st-century America, Chicago outclasses Milwaukee the way Washington dominates Baltimore. Unfortunately, the film was shot in suburban Santa Clarita, California, with a road trip to Oxnard, so not much can be done visually to express the Milwaukee v. Chicago dichotomy.
At 125 minutes, Bridesmaids is quite long for a comedy. The pacing is intentionally slow to pile up the audience’s discomfort, thus eliciting nervous laughter. My wife found it hilarious, but to me, it was either 20 minutes too long or too short.
Most of the movie’s laughs come from the odd man out among the five bridesmaids—the groom’s sister, a hefty lesbian who dresses like Hall of Fame golfer Ben Hogan. The metajokes are that lesbians are clueless about what most women like. Because nobody else much cares what obviously butch women think, the other bridesmaids never react (either positively or negatively) to her inordinately off-target conceptions of feminine fun. When the girls are arguing over a shower theme, the lesbian interjects her conception of a crowd-pleasing notion: fight club! “We get there early, oil up, then when the bride arrives, we beat the crap out of her!” The other women listen politely, then immediately go back to debating whether Annie’s suggested Parisian theme hasn’t already been done to death.
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