Running Time: 2 hours, 5 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Paul Feig
Quick Impressions:
I love Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live, and I’ve long felt that her movie roles don’t effectively showcase her talent, so I’m thrilled that she got to co-write this movie and create a role that played to her strengths. I’d heard a number of people rave that Bridesmaids was funny, and it is, but the story has such heart, the characters such depth. I was impressed with how real and relatable the characters seemed (even though some events were, of course, over the top). I would be willing to bet that almost no one has attended an engagement party quite like the one Helen throws for Lillian, and that nobody in attendance at such a party has ever done quite what Annie does in the movie. But I’m also completely sure that almost everyone has been at a party that seemed like that and wanted desperately to react just as Annie did.
Another thing that could not help but dominate my thoughts as I watched the movie is the incredible versatility of Rose Byrne. I’ve seen her in three movies now, Get Him to the Greek, X-Men: First Class, and Bridesmaids, and she’s given three performances so distinct from one another that it’s hard to believe it’s the same actress playing the roles.
The Good and The Great:
What made this movie wonderful was the combination of laugh-out-loud humor and a character-driven story with real heart. Bridesmaids was a genuinely funny movie full of outrageous jokes and off-the-wall scenes. Anything that could go wrong did, in a ludicrous and hyperbolic fashion. But the characters felt like real people with common and relatable problems. Any single woman who has ever had to participate in (or even attend) a close friend’s wedding knows exactly how Annie feels. We don’t all attack harmless cookies and befoul chocolate fountains, but perhaps a part of us wants to (and sometimes we inwardly cheer when someone else acts out in a similar—if less outrageous—fashion).
Weddings are really stressful, and planning and preparing for them is emotionally exhausting and full of potential pitfalls. Few brides and bridesmaids experience the series of increasingly awful calamities that happen to Lillian and her bridesmaids, but by the time the engagement party, the fittings, the shower, the cake tasting, the bachelorette party, the ceremony, and the reception are over, we feel like we’ve been through all the zany misadventures that unfold in this two-hour comedy.
Almost every scene elicits some laughs, or at least coaxes a smile, and yet there’s an underlying note of sadness. Annie may feel that she’s the most anguished, but almost none of the women involved with the wedding is actually happy.
Rather pointedly, there are two kinds of characters in the movie who do appear to be happy: 1) those who seem oblivious to their own shortcomings and behave rather viciously as if they lack any empathy for others and 2) those who recognize their own weaknesses but deliberately try to live in a way that enriches themselves and the people around them in spite of the fact that life is unfair.
Annie starts out somewhere between these two states, and then, in a self-pitying, kamikaze move, backslides into emotional immaturity of the first category. By the end of the movie, however, she’s grown emotionally and is firmly among the people who make the best of life and do what they can to ease the burdens of others.
Funniest Scene:
Without a doubt the flight to Vegas is the funniest part of the movie, but I was also quite amused by Annie’s interactions with customers at the jewelry store. And even though I looked away during portions of the food poisoning sequence (because I didn’t want to get queasy myself), I laughed pretty hard at Kristen Wiig’s increasingly ridiculous denials that she felt sick.
Best Joke:
No contest, my favorite moment in the entire movie came when the airline passenger in the seat beside Annie first started talking to her.
Best Scene:
The scene on the airplane is screamingly funny from start to finish, as is the scene that begins with Brazilian food and ends with Maya Rudolph’s Lillian squatting in the street in an expensive wedding gown. But I particularly liked the scene in Lillian’s house just before the wedding. The friendship between the two women felt so strong and so real.
Best Surprise [Possible light spoilers]:
When Megan tracks Annie down for a heart-to-heart, we begin to see the character in a new light, and Annie is forced to realize that she’s not the only person who has interiority and personal issues. This revelatory moment with Megan made me go back and rethink earlier statements made by her character. Some of the stuff she says and does is absolutely nuts—but, possibly, she knows this. From her first appearance in the movie, Megan (as perfectly portrayed by Melissa McCarthy) is a scene stealer and a hugely funny character. There are some uncomfortable moments when we seem to be laughing at her, not with her. In the end, however, it’s quite possible that she knows that we are laughing at her, that she’s deliberately making us laugh at her, and that she’s laughing hardest of all.
Her character is the one through which Annie realizes that other people have feelings, too. Of course, objectively everyone knows this, but it’s so easy to forget and regress to an adolescent level of social interaction in which we feel everyone else is critiquing our weaknesses but fail to realize that most people are just as preoccupied as we are with personal issues of their own.
The Performances:
Kristen Wiig gave an amazing performance as Annie, displaying real acting chops to go along with her wonderful wit and coming timing. Annie seemed like a real person with real problems who used humor as a defense mechanism but ultimately couldn’t make sense of everything going wrong in her life. Honestly, the character reminded me of my sister which made me like the movie even more. Wiig’s performance was so good because it was so understated. Zany things happened constantly in the movie, but Annie’s real feelings could be seen clearly in her eyes, heard in the slight strain of her voice.
Watching Bridesmaids convinced me of something that I’ve suspected for a long time: I like Maya Rudolph much better when she’s not trying to be funny. I thought she gave a great performance, too. Most of the time, she played the straight man, a bride who was much less crazy than everyone else in her wedding party. I found her performance as Lillian both believable and moving.
I fell in love with Chris O’Dowd’s Officer Nathan Rhodes practically the moment he showed up on screen. During the first moments of their exchange at Annie’s car window, I thought, Oh I hope this is her love interest, because something about him was refreshingly real and likeable. He was just a nice guy.
John Hamm was pretty fantastic as Ted, not a nice guy at all. The actor has a great sense of humor and does well in roles in which he mocks his own handsomeness by playing a shallow character with absolutely no inkling that he’s so ridiculous. The whole thing plays like some kind of delightful inside joke he’s sharing with us.
Jill Clayburgh was great as Annie’s mom. She seems so feisty and full of life as the non-alcoholic permanently in recovery. It’s hard to believe that she died last November.
I’ve already said that I’m stunned by Rose Byrne’s versatility. I really loved her performance as Helen, a character whose own life is complicated by the fact that she’s unintentionally awful and can’t seem to help herself. (I began to understand her after seeing the way her step-children treated her at the tennis court.) Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but smile and throw a party. Like a number of the characters, Helen is surprisingly complex, and Rose Byrne does a great job of playing her as a miserably lonely and unhappy woman who inadvertently makes herself hated because she so desperately wants to be loved.
Melissa McCarthy is outstanding as Megan, the one bridesmaid subtle in her increasing support of Annie and outrageous in almost every other respect. She’s screamingly funny throughout the movie but plays her serious scene with beautiful honesty.
The Negatives:
The movie was too long. I thoroughly enjoyed watching it all, but it could have been trimmed because there were long stretches with (relatively) little humor. Though admittedly the romance between Annie and the officer is charming, their scenes together could have been pared back a bit without losing the heart of the relationship, its promise and its problems.
I also didn’t like the man and his sister that Annie lived with. They seemed almost too creepy to me. That was the one part of the story that felt forced, as if it had gone too far. I mean, yes, we’ve all had some kooky roommates, but those two were almost unrealistically bizarre. Plus, the movie seems to promote the idea that if you look closely enough, other people have internal struggles and insecurities, just like you. But we’re scared to look any more closely at those, too, so they remain just freaks. (Of course, I suppose that theoretically, there may be people out there that it’s safer not to look at any closer.) The more I think about this, the more I recall that I’ve lived with some very weird people over the years, but these two still made me vaguely uncomfortable every time they were on screen. I don’t know if that’s good or bad anymore.
Overall:
Watching Bridesmaids was so much fun that I forgot halfway through that I was supposed to be watching it critically. Calling out all the amazingly funny moments will spoil the movie. But I can safely say that though hilarious, the film is grounded by its amazing heart that doesn’t feel syrupy or contrived, just amazingly sincere. Go see it. (But don’t take your children—unless they’re adults who live with you because their bizarre brother-and-sister roommates kicked them out.)