Bridesmaids (***)

People have made a big deal out of this comedy because the leading role, and most of the significant roles, are played by women. That this is a big deal is kind of sad. Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig plays the lead role and cowrote the script with Annie Mumolo. (The director—a dude—is TV veteran Paul Fieg.) Wiig plays a lot of characters on SNL who talk in odd voices, and movies involving ex-SNL cast members have a tendency to be built around extreme characters, in some cases characters created on the show. However, in this case Wiig plays mostly regular gal Annie, from Milwaukee, whose upcoming maid-of-honor gig sends her into an early midlife crisis. Her engaged friend is played by her former SNL cast-mate Maya Rudolph.

Of course, there are some hijinks that wouldn’t be out of place in an SNL skit. These all involve the titular characters engaging in wedding-related activities such as dress shopping. (The festivities in question are as absurdly lavish as any such portrayal—working-class folks, like the heroine, rarely get married in Hollywood movies—but the comedy as much mocks such excess as fetishizes it.) In some ways these scenes reminded me of The Hangover, also centered around pre-wedding shenanigans. So I had to think about why I generally liked the zany, over-the-top plotting there but not here. And I think it’s that whereas the one comedy is mostly the characters reacting to bizarre events, this movie has the characters themselves behaving bizarrely at time. For example, Annie’s back-and-forth toasting tussle with a fellow bridemaid (Rose Byrne) struck me as ridiculous—I couldn’t see two people (one, maybe) actually doing this (and no one stopping them). I could have also done without the requisite gross-out scene. (I’m not saying I didn’t hear laughs in the theater.)

On the other hand, whereas The Hangover doesn’t try hard to be anything but funny, Bridesmaids doubles as a story of friendship. As the toasting duel suggests, it’s her friend’s possibly preferring another friend rather than her having landed a husband that sends Annie into a jealous tizzy. Maybe Wiig wrote the wacky group scenes and Mumolo the other ones, I don’t know, but I like the movie better in the (semi-)“serious” parts. To my taste, the best scenes are the ones with Annie’s love interest. Chris O’Dowd plays what seems to be the only cop in Wisconsin. His scenes with Wiig are charming, funny and as natural as some of the ladies-only scenes are forced and “outrageous.”

IMDB link

viewed 6/5/11 at Riverview and reviewed 6/5/11 and 6/6/11