Kristen Wiig is a very pretty, very funny woman with reassuring crow’s feet etched around her surprisingly anguished blue eyes. Saturday Night Live fans know Wiig can act out (Target Lady!), but if you’ve been paying attention, she can also act — she played, of all things, a steadying force in Drew Barrymore’s underrated roller derby movie, Whip It. The warring impulses within Wiig set a wonderfully skittish tone for the painfully hilarious new movie Bridesmaids, a screwy tale of female friendship and wedding planning from hell. Were it not for some atonal meddling from co-producer Judd Apatow that’s clearly designed to put male bums in the seats, Bridesmaids would qualify as one of the most groundbreaking mainstream movies of the past decade — an indie women’s picture sneaking in under summer-blockbuster cover.
The movie, ably directed by Apatow collaborator Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks), was co-written by Wiig with her longtime friend and collaborator Annie Mumolo. Armed with a terrific ensemble plucked from the cream of current comedy, the two take a sharply affectionate scalpel to the chick-flick myth of earth-mother female friendship.
Of course you won’t find much textbook feminism in Bridesmaids; Wiig’s Annie, a stalled Milwaukee pastry chef, owes a lot more to Bridget Jones than she does to, say, Erin Brockovich. With her downtown bakery felled by recession, Annie takes a job selling jewelry, only to throw her dreary new gig into daily peril by assailing customers with her jaundiced views on love and marriage. Dumped by her boyfriend, she sleeps with a cheerfully uncommitted lout (Jon Hamm, happily parodying his hunky self) who thinks nothing of greeting his on-demand lover with “Hi, f – – – buddy!”
To make matters worse, Annie has no choice but to play good sport when she’s drafted to be maid of honor at the wedding of her best friend, Lillian, played by Wiig’s SNL BFF, Maya Rudolph. Plastering on a brave smile that’s constantly cracking to reveal a wounded fury beneath, Annie goes to war with Helen (Rose Byrne, superbitch — who knew?), a filthy-rich young country-club type who takes charge of planning the nuptials and threatens to replace Annie as Lillian’s best friend.
From there on, Bridesmaids is pretty much a sinus-clearing remake of George Cukor’s 1939 bitchfest The Women, minus the fascinators and handicapped mildly by the need to make its way, however unsteadily, toward a sunny ending. You may forgive that failing, however, when you meet Annie’s legit love interest, a slightly cross-eyed cop (played by Irish comic Chris O’Dowd) whose gift for turning life into fun and goodwill naturally makes Annie turn tail and run back to Hamm’s faithless heel.
