Before anyone accuses this virile, super-testosteroned he-man of any behavior even suggesting effeminacy, let me confess aforehand my yearning desire to see Bridesmaids, a chick-flick (not my term) from conception to marketing, and certainly not intended for guys like me who grow a new beard every three minutes. The reason for this sudden shift in perspective? Two words: Kristen Wiig, the sole reason to turn on Saturday Night Live anymore and the only comedic actress who could rightly be called a female Jim Carrey. I am admittedly her numero-uno fanboy.
Mind you, the producer/director duo of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig made sure to insert some operatic scatology into the already funny script to tempt a few dudes to the ticket-booth for this mostly femme-on-femme comedy. Wiig wrote the screenplay with Annie Mumolo, but it's not just a springboard for sexual-organ gags and bio-hazardous set-pieces (the latter is hard to resist, disgusting though it is). It's a chance to explore the joys and pains of love and its absence in the lives of 30-something women like maid-of-honor Wiig and her best buddy bride, Maya Rudolph.
Without that emotional underpinning, Bridesmaids might have come off as a knockoff of The Hangover, which by comparison, is more like a bad Marx Brothers movie, with long stretches of unfunniness punctuated by a few sharply written scenes. Even though some of the scenes in Bridesmaids are broadly drawn and lowbrow, one gets invested in the hearts and minds of all of the women in the wedding party early on. The only sympathy engendered by The Hangover is for Mike Tyson, when one wonders how they got him to parody himself without embarrassment. Poor Mike.
But back to Kristen Wiig, who does emotionally damaged and vulnerable and even dead drunk like nobody else in recent memory. Goldie Hawn had the ditzy blonde down to a science, and Reese Witherspoon was incomparable as the lethally charming high-schooler in Election, but there aren't that many plum roles for women in Hollywood comedies. Internet lists of the "100 Greatest Comedic Actors/Actresses" yield only eight women among the innumerable funnymen. I believe Kristen Wiig is the only actress capable of shifting the balance a wee bit. She, like Carrey, has a rubbery, expressive face and a fearlessness unseen since Lucille Ball broke the glass ceiling in the 1950s.
The rest of the supporting cast comes off well in Bridesmaids to boot, especially Melissa McCarthy as the plus-sized earth-mother and Rose Byrne as Wiig's oh-so-perfect rival. But it's the believable bond of friendship between bride and maid of honor that distinguishes this film from the witless buddy comedies being manufactured by the Apatow factory. It has laughs and heart at the same time, belying Christopher Hitchens's theory that women aren't frivolous enough to be funny. The fact is, they can make you laugh and cry simultaneously, a stunt Jim Carrey has tried to pull off with very mixed results for a long time now. Viva Kristen Wiig, the latest in a line of SNL cast-members to make the small-to-big-screen transition with talent to spare.