With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow’s school of middle-American humor opens its female wing; and the maiden flight begins with a wonderful flourish that’s just as funny as anything in the boys’ movies even while it informs us of a slightly different climate. The essence of the joke is having Jon Hamm play a jerk. He’s an amiable, cuddly jerk; he’s no smarmy narcissist. But his ears don’t work. He makes love the way he likes to make love. It’s not great for his girlfriend — who is not only not his girlfriend, as we find out right away, but just his “Number Three,” as he calls out after she makes him let her out of the car and he leaves her in the dust. But we can see right away why this woman would come back for more, because he is, after all, Don Draper. 

And she has nothing better to do. In a briskly summarized back-story, we learn that her real boyfriend left her in the lurch when the two of them were running a bake shop in downtown Milwaukee. Whether it was his defection or the recession that closed the place, Annie (Kristen Wiig) has lost her way since. She’s not good at the jewelry-shop job that an AA member gave her as a favor to his sponsor, Annie’s mom (the late Jill Clayburgh, looking great, considering). She has a scary roommate situation that involves an English brother-sister team that seems dropped-in from an aliens nightmare (What are Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson doing in Milwaukee?). And now her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is getting married. 

Lillian is marrying a well-placed young man from Chicago. His parents belong to a ritzy country club, as does his boss, whose new wife, Helen (Rose Byrne), has gratiously taken Lillian — a poor Milwaukee girl, after all — under her wing. We misspelled “graciously” on purpose, because Helen’s sweetness is as grating as a bed of sugar cubes. It’s unfortunate that Lillian has asked Annie to be her matron of honor, because Helen is second only to Martha Stewart in the expertise department, and she knows how to deploy correct politeness as a deadly weapon. Annie and Helen quickly fall into a duel for Lillian’s soul, and the movie’s second act passes in a blaze of animosity that makes the bitchery of The Women look very antique indeed. 

There are two other nice ladies in the wedding party (played by Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper), and then there is the groom’s sister, Megan, who is played by Melissa McCarthy. Ms McCarthy is built, to put it nicely, like a fireplug, and she has a direct sense of assaultive humor to go with it. (More than once she struck me as the American, female counterpart to Ricky Gervais). The buzz about Bridesmaids is that a good deal of improvisation was encouraged, and Ms McCarthy not only brings the freshness of stand-up to proceedings but she makes it work. Although wildly implausible as any kind of bridesmaid, she throws herself at you with irresistible conviction. (Sometimes, she throws other characters at you.) The air marshals of America, meanwhile, are going to have to work on their cover.

Romance eventually taps Annie’s shoulder in the form of a policeman who pulls her over because her tail lights are out. He turns out to be Chris O’Dowd, who played the sad-sack disk jockey in The Boat That Rocked who was conned into marrying January Jones. (The Mad Men linkages are going to ramify densely in the coming years.) His character, Rhodes, is portrayed as sweet-natured and vulnerable, and we don’t know whose side to take when Annie walks out on him during what ought to have been a nice morning-after scene. His offense? To presume on her baking abilities (he was a satisfied customer of her bake shop). Bridesmaids would have been just about perfect if this cloud in Annie’s past were cleared up — we watch her do enough baking to agree with Rhodes that it’s probably what she ought to be doing, so what’s the big problem? — but we can be thankful that the point is not belabored. 

I found Bridesmaids the movie to be a lot funnier than Bridesmaids the trailer. The trailer includes at least two so-so jokes that got dumped from the final feature, much to its improvement. Still, for all its riotous moments, this is not a sidesplitting movie. Comparisons will be made, I expect, to Mr Apatow’s Funny People, in which Adam Sandler made frequent crossings of the frontier between drama and comedy. Ms Wiig, one of the great character actors of all time, plays Annie more or less straight, which is only fair, since the point of the film is to demonstrate that women can be just as funny at being losers as men can (if they’re funny). But there are bathtubs of momentary pathos that would never be tolerated in a boys’ movie, and it will be interesting to see how well audiences digest the many moments at which Ms Wiig looks like a homesteader lost in the dust bowl. Without saying a word (almost), she conveys the awfulness of being the one who isn’t getting married, the one whom nobody wants to marry. These moments don’t last long. Bridal mayhem persistently intervenes. And when Annie begs Rhodes to turn on his patrol car’s siren at the end, you wonder if there are any justices of the peace in the neighborhood who are working late.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.