Bridesmaids

Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) trends highly positive on the metacriticism sites. 90% of its viewers rate the film highly. Roger Ebert liked it. Most of the critics said that it was a successful combination of raunch comedy of the kind promoted by Judd Apatow and a “chick flick”. In fact, the movie is awful, dull, and so bad that it is difficult to endure. The film is like The Hangover – it’s slipshod and unimaginative, but it promotes a popular industry and, therefore, people feel that they have to enjoy the picture. The Hangover promotes the idea that you can strike it rich in Las Vegas, that innocent debauchery solves all problems, and that everyone deserves a getaway during which they can indulge their most squalid and reprehensible fantasies – this notion powers the entertainment industry in Las Vegas and, accordingly, the film was wildly successful although objectively terrible. Bridesmaids is about a multi-million (billion) dollar business catering to women – the business of selling women wild bachelor parties, exorbitant bridal showers, and elaborate weddings. It promotes the notion that women should be just as stupidly naughty and selfish as men. Like The Hangover, the film traffics in the concept that people should drop their inhibitions and express their wildest and most transgressive desires – and that this conduct is somehow liberating. (Films like The Hangover and Bridesmaids reprise the wild party ideology of the sixties, but without the Blakean mysticism or the political subversion – they ultimately domesticate into banality everything interesting or defensible about sixties excess.) Bridesmaids is ugly, poorly filmed and edited, foul-mouthed, and cruel. Kristen Wiiig appears in just about every shot and she exudes a vicious, heartless narcissism – all the more troubling because, partly, unintended. Wiig’s character is a lonely, bitter self-centered old maid who competes with a prim beautiful socialite for the role of “best friend” to the character played by Maya Rudolph, the hapless bride – her role is so underwritten as to be almost non-existent. Wiig is nasty and incredibly selfish and you really don’t want to see her succeed at anything – she deserves to be alone and bitter since she is a willfully malevolent person. Wiig gets everyone sick with food poisoning, thus precipitating an Apatow-style gross-out scene involving much graphic puking and ending with poor Rudolph shitting herself in an elaborate wedding dress. (Wiig is too vain to be shown in similar distress; the film spares us the sight of her puking or defecating). Later, Wiig gets drunk and drugged on a plane and causes a riot, thus preventing the bridesmaids from partying in Vegas. Later, she disrupts a wedding shower in a spectacularly cruel and unmotivated rampage. In the end, of course, she gets the handsome cop – a sweet little Irishman with a twinkle in his eye, cute as a leprechaun (I thought dialect-speaking Irish cops went out of fashion in the thirties). Wiig doesn’t deserve the happy ending – she has earlier acted with unmotivated cruelty to the poor guy. In addition, we see her enjoying vigorous, apparently satisfying, sex with an uncaring hunk. So, in effect, she gets to have her cake and eat it too. Annie Mumalo, who co-wrote the picture with Wiig, was one of LA’s Groundlings and her improvisatory background is evident: many of the scenes are clearly improvised, but badly improvised – the dialogue is completely inconsequential and inert. The film is crass, vulgar, and immoral – it suggests that people should be rewarded for vicious, temperamental outbursts – being a bitch, the film says, is a good thing and a state to which one should aspire.