Review: Bridesmaids
Bridesmaids is not a romantic comedy. Bridesmaids is not ‘the Female Hangover’. Bridesmaids is not a ‘chick flick’. What Bridesmaids is, is a charming and very funny film about a woman getting her life back together.
A lot of the marketing and advance buzz surrounding Bridesmaids has suggested that the film is the female version of the film The Hangover. Instead, the film is much more like the film The 40 Year-Old Virgin in tone and intent. Both films are about average, relatable people whose life took a slight detour.
Kristen Wiig stars (and co-wrote) in the film as Annie. As the film opens, we find Annie is already in a bad place. She’s dissatisfied with her station in life, exhibiting serious signs of depression. She’s living in an apartment with housemates who make her home-life awkward and uncomfortable, she’s working a retail job that she hates, and her only thrill in life comes from regularly sleeping with a wealthy guy who cares little for her.
When her best friend announces that she is getting married, Annie begins to see a reflection of her own life as her friend, Lillian, prepares to move into a new phase of life. Annie is also introduced to Lillian’s new acquaintance, a woman who is part of Lillian’s new life with her fiancé and is everything that Annie is not – wealthy and confident in life.
While not written or directed by Judd Apatow (he serves as a Producer on the film), Bridesmaids has a very strong imprint of the Apatow brand of storytelling. Structurally, much like all of his films, it starts with a character whose life is at a low point and ends with the character having achieved a triumph over their own personal mental roadblocks that prevent them from achieving (or have a chance of achieving) fulfillment.
Bridesmaids serves as a reunion of sorts of the TV series Freaks and Geeks, bringing back together co-creators Judd Apatow and Paul Feig. Feig, who serves on this film as the Director and a Producer, has been a strong influence on the work of Apatow, with both men striving to produce comedy that comes from a very real place. As such, the characters in this film, while sometimes broad and extreme, all have motivations and perspectives that come from a highly relatable universal truth.
One of the real strengths of the film is that care has been taken to ensure that the female leads actually behave and interact as real women, rather than standard rom-com cliché’s. All of the characters (men and women) in Bridesmaids have a genuine viewpoint that comes from a characters motivations, belief system, and general station in life. It’s so easy to have women in a film go crazy about a wedding, but it’s so much more satisfying to see Annie concerned about the financial cost of being a part of her friends wedding, a bridesmaid happy to be a part of a hens weekend to escape a home life dominated by her sons (“there’s semen everywhere”, she whines, exasperated at one point in the film), and the bride herself concerned that she’s lost a sense fun and of herself throughout the wedding planning.
So much has been said about ‘bromances’ on film in recent years, yet so little care has been given to genuine female friendships on the big screen. Bridesmaids addresses that completely with a friendship between Annie and Lillian that is real. The audience gets a sense that they have a longtime history, share personal injokes, and understand a motivation in a way that only a close friend can.
Bridesmaids is, ultimately, a trivial comedy made purely for entertainment. But within that lies a comedy that is a genuinely affecting and engaging film. This is one of the true highlights of this year in film.