Friday, May 13, 2011

It's obvious what the question will be hanging over the head of every discerning film viewer, man or woman, as they walk in to Bridesmaids this weekend: can a film full of funny woman play for as many laughs as a film starring men? Don’t call gender bias or a low blow in the gender wars, call it simple truth. Women are funny, particularly the stellar cast of females headlining Bridesmaids but in the history of film, it has been a rare, if ever, occasion to gather a cast of ladies for a truly funny film unhampered by the restrictions of Hollywood’s massive assumptions towards what a female audience finds entertaining. Yet, this is exactly what Bridesmaids, with its raunchy comedic heritage of director Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks) and producer Judd Apatow, is attempting to do: throw off the shackles of the XX chromosome and break the comedic barriers to show that women can wrangle the horse of comedy just as well as any testosterone pumping man.

Movie Review - Bridesmaids

Does it work though? In a way, yes. Kristen Wiig has crafted a film that for the most part drop kicks the conventions of lady love to the curb and indulges all the nasty poop and dick humor the loosely knit comedic entity The Jew-tang Clan has perfected in the last few years. Wiig’s script is dirty. Penis-talk, literally fifteen minutes dedicated to shitting, a lot of sex - Wiig stitches all of them in to her script about a woman, Annie (Kristen Wiig), who is asked to be the maid of honor for her lifelong best friend’s (Maya Rudolph) wedding. Annie is of course at a drastic low-point in her life and the idea that her best friend is moving on to a new chapter shocks her to the core and to say the least she bumbles a few of the staid traditions of pre-matrimony. Wiig has put together a script that admirably approaches the sort of raunch-humor-meets-soulful-insight Judd Apatow has scientifically welded in to mainstream comedy with the eye of, well, a woman. Instead of dick size jokes and look how many women I’ve banged humor, we get going down on dudes is gross jokes and oops I pooped in my wedding dress humor. The reversal of viewpoint, so easy, works on most occasions with Wiig and her talented co-stars bringing the funny in scene after scene.

The issue with film though, and it’s a damaging issue, is that it never goes far enough with its vagina and boob humor. Call it the meddling of the studio, or the expression of humor through the female gaze, but the film surrounds its hard-hitting hilarity about penises in faces with the kind of chattering femme-blabber one might find in a Jennifer Lopez rom-com. Truthfully, the film’s structure holds fairly tightly to the conventions of romantic comedies, and it greatly detracts from the improv style gross-out humor it does so well. Wiig is a fantastic lead and I can’t wait to see where her career as both writer and actor takes her, but she never allows her film to just be a comedy. Instead everything has to wrap up nicely. Everything has to work out alright. While watching Bridesmaids I could see the very non-stereotypical females behind the picture at work and felt jarred when their more stereotypical counterparts kept popping up on screen. I’m going to go right out there and blame the studios for the tone and narrative issues in the film, as I think a big budget comedy starring, gasp, women was probably a fairly scary sell for them, and what better way to buoy the budget then to make a film that they knew would play well to an audience of white wine drinking ladies.

If anything Bridesmaids is the first volley in a hopefully new chapter in the female comedy film. It doesn’t completely break the chains of chromosomal containment, but it gives them a fairly solid walloping. And the promise Bridesmaids shines with is enough to hope that the next go at it will be the one that finally crushes them completely.

- Noah Sanders -



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