Film review: Bridesmaids - falling flat

It isn’t just toilet humour that dumbs it down: typical insecurities that do deserve attention are explored poorly.

‘But women can be funny!’ beseeches Bridesmaids, a chick flick that claims to blow the lid on female friendships, romantic love, and the perils that modern day living thrusts on womankind. Written by women, purportedly for women, Bridesmaids focuses on a group of thirty-something females who are thrown together to celebrate their friend’s wedding. Somewhere between a bout of food poisoning in an elite atelier and lesbian jokes at a bridal shower, hilarity is supposed to ensue — but it doesn’t.

Annie (Kirsten Wiig) is a failed pastry chef whose life is slowly unraveling: she has just lost her business, is trapped in a relationship with a man who mistreats her and the friend who she has always relied on for emotional support has just announced she’s getting married.

Lillian (Maya Rudolph), who wants Annie to be her bridesmaid, introduces her to a coterie of other females who are to share this special honour. The line-up includes a fat chick, a desperate housewife, a Martha Stewart wannabe, and a vestal virgin. It is the prettier, richer and more organised Helen (Rose Byrne), the Martha Stewart wannabe, who irks Annie the most.

As Annie fails to perform her bridesmaid’s duties, Helen edges her out and ‘steals’ Lillian. Upstaged and ignored, Annie is sucked down a spiral of self-pity. Will she be able to get her life together and win Lillian back?

This simple story about the little jealousies that are part of any relationship could have been funny on its own. Unfortunately, the writers took a cue from The Hangover and smeared the film with every fart and poop related joke they could think of.

It isn’t just the toilet humour that dumbs it down: typical insecurities that do deserve attention are explored poorly, through clichéd plot development and ho-hum dialogue.

Critics praising the film say it is the first romantic-comedy that deals specifically with female friendship. You only need to go as far back as Mean Girls to see that isn’t true. Although Kirsten Wiig’s performance deserves praise, she isn’t the first ‘funny girl’ to make her presence felt on the big screen — Barbara Streisand did that some 40 years ago. In the end, you don’t need to watch Bridesmaids to realise that women can be funny, anyone who has ever had a good female friend already knows that.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, October 9^th, 2011.