I was almost hoping the movie would somehow get less funny so that the six or so women in the row behind me would stop laughing hysterically and snorting in my ear, unapologetic full-nostril nose snorts of the type that can only 
come when one is having too good a time and doesn’t care who the fuck knows. Sorry for that, I was channeling the sorting women, or more likely Annie, the main character of the movie, Bridesmaids, played with winning comedic dash by Kristen Wiig, which the row of women and I saw the other night in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Wiig loves to riff. There are a few great extended gags which she generously shares with Maya Rudolph, playing Lillian, her best friend and the bride-to-be, and Chris O’Dowd, playing Officer Rhodes, her Highway Patrolman love interest. They spin jokes and variations of jokes off one idea, effortlessly and usually, to my chagrin given the boisterous women behind me in the movie theater, hilariously. Wiig is naturally goofy, as she has shown in the smaller roles she’s had in movies such as Adventureland and Ghost Town. It’s great to see her comic sensibilities fill the screen as she improvises and invents new comic variations on sometimes crass movie gags. Her routines with Maya Rudolph, especially, are both funny and warm. They illustrate the interesting, wonderful, and unique relationship shared by these funny characters. Their scenes work as crass movie comedy and also as examples of two friends who enjoy being crass and have fun grossing themselves out.
But there could have been less of this. The riffs go one usually just one joke too far, and the movie, at just over two hours, seems overlong. It also seems underdeveloped. Though it’s called Bridesmaids, it focuses on just one, and there definitely could have been more of the others, who are introduced so nicely and played so fully by the other actresses in the cast: Melissa McCarthy as Megan, the socially inept, gross one; Ellie Kemper as Becca, the innocent one; Wendi McLendon-Covey as Rita, the harried housewife; and especially Rose Byrne as Helen, Annie’s nemesis and Lillian’s new best friend. We only get glimpses of these characters, but each is played so expertly and the glimpses are so accurate that we want more. Only Melissa McCarthy is given the time and material to break out of the pack and go someplace new. The others are left as types, straining at the limits of their character arcs. This is especially unfortunate for Byrne, whose character seems to have particular potential to become something greater than just Annie’s nemesis and a stereotypical uptight rich control freak.
The movie feels a little too reliant on the standard good-time comedy movie formula: it all turns out well in the end for Annie and Lillian more because it has to than because the characters reconcile with each other or learn something about themselves. Or more accurately, the characters learn something and do something that makes the movie end happily because they live on a comedy movie planet and the there gravity compels them to. That didn’t seem to bother the women behind me, or the rest of the audience in the theater, who laughed and whooped and snorted with abandon. It also didn’t seem to bother me too much. The movie was very funny, and hid its deeper, more sentimental side underneath an onslaught of jokes and inspired riffs. Sort of like Annie herself.
Tags: Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig, Movies
