Bridesmaids

Well! If I have ever used the phrase “run, don’t walk,” to tell you to do something, I have never meant it more than I do now, when I say run, don’t walk, to your nearest cinema multiplex, and pay your money and receive your ticket and sit in the theater and laugh and laugh at our new friend BRIDESMAIDS!

Here are some things. Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumalo. Starring a vast menagerie of hilarious women. Genuinely affecting. Believable relationships of all kinds. Jokes about handsome men being terrible lovers. Scenes in which women talk to each other not about boys. A great tennis-violence scene. A scene where Kristen Wiig tries to knock over a chocolate fountain and a teenage girl in close-up says “This is SO AWESOME.”

So, mainstream formula-wise, this is not a rom-com! Audiences may be subtly, indefinably confused by this. The film centers on a female protagonist and is a comedy, thus it must be a romantic comedy, with a rom-com’s set-in-stone formula, right? Wrong. My friends, this movie is a BROMANCE. Its formula is the formula of the bromance, not the rom-com. They are different!

Also it’s just a “com.” I kind of wish we could just have comedies again, instead of bro- or ro- comedies. Although “Bridesmaids” is 100% the formula of a bromance, so I guess lets just acknowledge that and move on. It even ends with a wedding between a beloved main character girl whose hijinks we have enjoyed, and a totally nondescript dude we have never heard say a single word. GENDER REVERSED BROMANCE.

While problems with men do plague Kristen Wiig, they are certainly not her only problems. She’s also broke, her bakery closed down because of the recession, and she generally doesn’t feel very good about herself. The scene where she bakes a single beautiful elaborate cupcake and then morosely eats it by herself! Damn. She has ennui! Not just boyfriend-based ennui, but the genuine article–you know, the kind of ennui that actual human women feel sometimes. Kristen Wiig, in case you were wondering, is able to nail ennui. I never really thought about it before, but she is an actor, not just a funny-face actor (although she is also among the preeminent funny-face actors in history). I am not ashamed to tell you that I literally cried TWICE while watching this film. Kristen Wiig! I feel you, girl! Driving around in your shitty broke-ass car and trying not to show how terrified you are by the $800 price tag on that bridesmaid dress! All you have is your best friend and now a rich pretty girl is moving in on her! What are you gonna do with your life?

So, while yes, there are boy problems (Jon Hamm is the boy problem! He’s basically just playing Don Draper but with modern slang (“Hey fuckbuddy!”). He is very funny. “Awww, I feel bad…I really want you to leave but I don’t know how to ask you without sounding like a dick.”) and while there is an Ideal Boy who Believes In Her but who she can’t fall in love with until she Learns To Love Herself, the central relationship of the film is the one between Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph–the bros of this bromance. Their friendship is so real, so lovely, their humor so easy and generous. You totally feel their lifelong love. They feel like the real thing–watching them reminds me of my own friendships with ladies. The multiple layers, the inside jokes, the deep communication without words, the sisterly rage when a boy is mean, the possibility of conversational topics that have nothing to do with boys. They look at each other with love in the eyes, to paraphrase Heath Ledger talking about how it was weird to be in Brokeback Mountain. When Wiig starts spiraling out of control, bombarded with jealousy, self-loathing, and a truly hideous co-bridesmaid who steals her ideas and her best friend, the rift that grows between her and Rudolph is super painful! NO GIRLS! DON’T FIGHT!!! All you have is each other!

So there’s that. Then there’s the rest of it! The other bridesmaids! Damn, you guys, Melissa McCarthy?! Wendie McClendon-Covey from “Reno 911”? Also the co-writer of the film, Annie Mumalo, has a great cameo. “Last night I dreamed our plane crashed. You were in it.” I really did not stop laughing for this entire movie, except for the two parts where I was crying. One of these crying parts involved me crying while watching Kristin Wiig crying while watching the part of “Castaway” where Tom Hanks loses Wilson.

I’ve long longed for a Great Switcheroo with the kind of classic bromance of a, like, “I Love You Man.” Rom-coms are legendarily misogynist, but the bromance tends to simply ignore women altogether. Judd Apatow does the best he possibly can in this regard, and he does better than almost any director I can think of, amazingly, with making his female characters three dimensional and human and funny, instead of just “featureless hot boobies girls” who are shrewish and you don’t understand why anyone would like them, much less this charming schlubby guy, and wait a second why would this completely humorless artificial but drop-dead supermodel gorgeous GIRL like this schlubby GUY? NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE ARRRGH! So Apatow does the formula one better, for sure, by putting Leslie Mann in there, Catherine Keener, Rashida Jones, etc., and actually showing us the girls’ perspectives, making them funny and warm, blah. As opposed to, like, “The Hangover,” jesus christ. But he is still a dude and that’s what he knows, and that is the perspective from which we watch his films–we identify with the main dude. I have been longing for an I Love You Man style film that simply switches the gender roles of the formula, Ripley-in-“Alien”-style. And it seems like Apatow gets that, too, since he fucking produced “Bridesmaids,” and kudos to him. If I had millions of dollars I’d give some of it to Kristen Wiig too.

So here we have kind of a loser fuck-up of a GIRL who we nonetheless sympathize with, whose true love in life is her best friend, and whose inner beauty is ultimately seen and nurtured by a sexy, non-fuck-up of a GUY, hooray. Switcheroo! And it works! Also who the fuck is Chris O’Dowd? I thought I would fucking die of adorableness. And he was funny too. This film truly is the best of all possible worlds. “How can you just stop baking, when you love it so much? If I couldn’t be a cop anymore I’d still take my gun out and shoot people”

Also it is directed by Paul Feig. I ask you, WHAT IS NOT TO LIKE. There is one annoying very small homophobic joke that I could have lived without, and maybe one or two way-too-easy “look how unattractive Melissa McCarthy is” “jokes” that pissed me off, but otherwise it was wonderful. Women being funny! Women being nice to each other! Women having more shit going on than just boyfriends! Women carrying a whole goddamn film, a comedy no less, and nailing it! Obviously I have always thought women were funny; I have always wanted women to be hailed and enjoyed in film comedies the way they always have been in television comedies. Women have obviously BEEN IN a lot of film comedies, but hailed? Uniquely hailed? Not so much. It is weird that this is the first movie that seems to finally be about to bridge that bizarre gap (go read that Anna Faris article, seriously). I PRAY DAILY that it will beat “Thor” in weekend grosses. It was so much more consistently funny than any bromance I have ever seen. I even saw it in a packed audience filled with dumbasses and THEY were all laughing too, though I could have lived without the performative “EWWWWWWWWWWWWWW”s they always need to yell out whenever anything gay or fat happens. But “what are you gonna do.”

“Oh no, we have sex constantly. But we haven’t kissed in FIVE YEARS. You know? Sometimes I just want to watch The Daily Show…without him entering me. You know?”

“I just can’t wait to be a mother. It must be so beautiful.”
“The other night I was making a lovely dinner for my family, and my youngest son came in and said he wanted to order a pizza. I said ‘no, we are not ordering a pizza,’ and he said ‘Mom why don’t you go FUCK YOURSELF.’ He’s NINE.”

There is a scene involving projectile vomit AND SHIT, including somebody shitting in the street wearing a wedding gown. That’s just a li’l teaser.

There is a masterful scene on an airplane wherein Kristen Wiig is drunk and has taken too many Xanax, and refuses to leave first class. She calls the flight attendant “Stove” although his name is “Steve.” “Ok, I’m leaving….STOVE…..what kind of a name is STOVE”

(whipping open the curtain between first class and coach): “This should be OPEN. Because it’s CIVIL RIGHTS. This is the NINETIES.”

In conclusion: Kristen Wiig = genius. Women are amazing. Judd Apatow is a true hero. “Bridesmaids” is doing really well at the box office. Times are changing. Anthony Lane is an idiot. My dog is driving me crazy. I drank too much coffee. I want to french Chris O’Dowd and Kristin Wiig and then I want to travel back to the 1950’s and french Robert Mitchum.

THANKS! Go see this movie! Give it some money!