So Judd Apatow doesn’t hate women. Many knew this already, but here it is in Bridesmaids, an Apatow comedy with all the foulness and frank humor of any male-themed gross-out comedy.
It isn’t that Apatow hated women; he just preferred to point his cameras at men, probably because he understands them better since, oh, you know … he’s a man. Everyone seems to forget, though, that Apatow has filmed great female parts, including Katherine Heigl and Leslie Mann in Knocked Up, and the wonderful Catherine Keener performance in 40-Year-Old Virgin, but nevermind.
Enough about Apatow; he only produced Bridemaids. Let me instead direct praise toward director Paul Feig, a prominent TV director who understands film just as well, and also writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who bring three-dimensional female characters to the foreground in a male-dominated genre. And look, no Will Ferrell or Seth Rogen anywhere in this!
Underrated Saturday Night Live writer Kristen Wiig stars in the film as the down-on-her-luck bridesmaid. She’s Annie, a plucky woman in her late 30s who hasn’t found fulfillment out of life. Her bakery closed, she’s single, she floats from bad relationship to bad relationship, and her car is a hunk of junk. She lives with an English brother and sister who have a rather odd relationship for siblings.
Annie’s childhood best friend Lillian (SNL alum Maya Rudolph) gets engaged and picks Annie to be the maid of honor. Trouble starts early when Annie meets one of the other bridesmaids, Helen (Rose Byrn), who is richer and snootier than Annie can tolerate. You've heard of the phenomenon of Bridezilla? Helen is bridezilla's evil sidekick. At one point Helen throws a Lillian a party: the invitations come with live butterflies, guests are taken to the party on horses, there’s a chocolate fountain of immense proportions and the party favors are yellow lab puppies. Helen is clearly spoiled beyond belief and it rubs Annie in all the wrong ways.
Wiig plays into all this with a very subtle, and seething, jealous rage. Her tart caricatures from SNL are gone, and instead we’re getting a personal and realistic performance of a woman drawn away from her best friend by jealousy, an emotion that women have mastered in Bridesmaids. The film seems to hint that women enjoy their female friends, but beneath the friendship there is a river of competition that flows like a torrent. Notice the early sequence at the engagement party as Annie and Helen one-up their dueling toasts to their friend. It’s painful and desperate, but to women it’s business as usual, albeit to an exaggerated degree.
By talking about the underlying themes I’m making the film sound less like a comedy so let me end that now: Bridesmaids is a hilarious exercise in role reversals. You’ve seen men behave badly in movies like The Hangover; well, here’s women doing embarrassing things in the name of comedy. If you’ve seen only a handful of comedies then you’ve seen the man-with-diarrhea scene. Well, here’s one with women that’s better. And it’s in a bridal boutique with its white carpets, white dresses and couture luxury.
Wiig has some great physical scenes, including one where she’s drugged on an airplane and another in a car as she tries to get a cop’s attention. "Hey, arrest me, I'm driving topless," she screams at the cop as she zings past. She’s supported in these scenes by some very funny co-stars, especially Melissa McCarthy, who is the Zach Galifianakis oddity of the bunch. She’s silly and raw, and it will likely be a performance that will prove her worth in future comedies.
I thoroughly enjoyed Bridesmaids for all its obvious and not-so-obvious elements: the comedy and the deeper relationships women have with each other. They play against, and also with, each other in ways that are refreshing. Wiig has always been a force to be reckoned with, but here she proves she can play with the boys and beat them at their own game.
