Bridesmaids (2011) Review

Originally written on May 4, 2011, for AD Forums. Spoilers marked with bold text.

 So I saw this last night at an advanced screening. I've been looking forward to this since it was announced, because I love Judd Apatow, Kristen Wiig, comedies, and pimped-out dresses. Sadly, no one wears the awesome costumes in the pervasive posters in the movie.

In any case, I tend to love the Apatow-produced films that, beneath their exterior of raunch (and boy does Bridesmaids have a lot of raunchy going-ons), have a very real undercurrent of emotion to them. Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall remain my favorite Apatow-produced films because their core conflicts are so simple and easy to relate to. Who among us hasn't felt the pain of being separated from a good friend, or been through that one breakup that really eviscerates us mentally? Bridesmaids, I am happy to say, falls into this category.

Kristen Wiig's character is a thirty-something woman with a failed business under her belt, a smarmy fuck buddy who uses her horribly, and a best friend (Maya Rudolph) who's about to get married. Rudolph asks Wiig to be maid of honor, and she accepts. However, a rival bridesmaid (Rose Byrne) enters open competition with Wiig, and the whole of the wedding preparations go hopelessly awry. That's the general plot summary (you might want to add "with Melissa McCarthy being all kinds of awesome on the periphery" in that summary), but it's not the real plot. Behind this framework is a very moving story about how people drift apart and come back together, and about what true friendship looks like. Wiig is a mess in this whole movie, and her emotional breaks are much like those Jason Segel enacted in Sarah Marshall - realistic, hysterically funny, but most of all, emotionally resonant. Wiig, Rudolph, and Byrne are fully realized characters, a rarity for comedy and an even bigger rarity for women in comedy. A lot of the chatter I heard coming out of the theater was emphatic that these were "actual women", not stereotypes.

Much as I enjoy the fact that there is a definite emotional core to this movie, the actual plot is pretty scattershot. Since the process of preparing all the wedding necessities is fragmented, I understand why the movie comes off as fragments that pull together at the end. It still bothered me that the flow of the movie was jumpy. It was very much a "this happens, and now THIS HAPPENS" type of movie. The arc with Wiig and the adorkable Chris O'Dowd is an exception to this; their plot moved well and made a lot of sense. With the bridesmaids, things just kind of happened. Yes, emotional depth grew from it, but there was a sense of "let's throw every bridal movie thing in here."

Which brings me to my other gripe - the ladies. Byrne, Wiig, and Rudolph, as I said earlier, have fleshed-out characters. Melissa McCarthy is essentially the "weird relative of groom/bride" character, but damn it if she isn't funny, and, by the end, she turns out to be a fairly developed character as well. (I think she and Zack Galifinakis' character in The Hangover would get along very well.) The other two ladies, Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey, are not. It would be frustrating if they were just joke characters, but they're actually given a plot arc - spoiler they have a drunken lesbian kiss on a plane after a rather lengthy conversation about marriage and sex end spoiler - that completely vanishes. After the spoilered event occurs about half way through the movie - absolutely never mentioned again. It's immensely frustrating to me, as that thread had the potential to be... well, a lot of things. Funny, interesting, awkward. But no. Talk about a waste.

Funny how those gripes seem like things that could break a film. But they don't, because this is a comedy, and people don't care as long as they're laughing. Speaking of which...

To the comedy aspects. The film was fairly amusing, though I can't think of any one line that stands out. This is very much a situational comedy, the kind of movie where afterwards, you and your friends say, "remember when this happened?" And you crack up remembering it. This film is also raunchy as fuck. It's a pretty vulgar movie, something that the audience in my screening was a bit surprised at, for some odd reason. (What'd they expect from Apatow?) I guess seeing women vomit on each other wasn't what they expected. I loved that the movie was willing to take comedic risks that most male-driven comedies wouldn't touch. I think the most interesting reaction the whole movie got was when Wiig called a teenage brat a 'cunt'. Half the theater burst into applause; the other half gasped in shock. I think that scene demonstrates how much this movie subverts our expected notion of a female-driven comedy, and I enjoy that it doesn't turn into a saccharine rom-com.

To recap: excellent emotional core marred by lame plot setups; Melissa McCarthy is awesome; extremely funny and vulgar. Not the best Apatow film made, but definitely worth the ten bucks, and a great freshman writing effort from Wiig. I'm gonna go see it again, for sure.

****/*****