Florida, Man: BARB & STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is silly. Just plain silly. They don’t make them this loopy and loony and freewheeling good vibes nonsensical every day. It stars Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, co-writers, too, reuniting ten years after their hilarious Bridesmaids. That movie was a hilarious escalation of comedic scenarios in a conventional character-based way, a look at women’s friendships in a pressure-cooker of milestones. This one is more like an all-human Muppet movie with Austin Powers energy seeping in around the edges. It’s flat-out absurd in every second. Yet, it’s still about women, about best friends navigating aging and life changes. Barb and Star are melodiously accented Nebraskans fired from their jobs at a chain furniture store who decide to shake things up with a trip to a middle-aged paradise resort on the Florida coast. There they both fall in lust with a strapping secret agent (Jamie Dornan) who happens to be working for an underwater supervillain (Wiig in pasty pale makeup and a tragic hairdo) plotting to attack the local shrimp-based beauty pageant with killer mosquitos. So that’s going on, but really it’s just as much about: getting blackout drunk and dancing to a club remix of “My Heart Will Go On,” buying tacky seashell bracelets that are a little too sharp, sneaking out a window onto a pool raft and drifting past your friend practicing her calligraphy on the porch. Wacky developments, goofy voices, random asides, and daffy design abounds, with time for both funny background signs (a dumpy motel advertises “Some TVs”) and colorful dance sequences. (Dornan, freed from Fifty Shades, cuts loose with a ballad he addresses to some random seagulls, the highlight of the picture.) This jumble of nonsense is carried along simply by the strength of the fun the performers themselves seem to be having, a sense of wanting to keep the good times rolling just because everyone involved can effectively communicate just how enjoyable they find their own nonsense. It plays like one of those sui generis oddities — a Hot Rod, or Cabin Boy, or Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion — where comedic voices are given free reign to just do whatever. If you can get even a little bit on the wavelength it’s mostly a blast, even as it starts to wear a little thin in the back half. Wiig and Mumolo are confident enough in their own sense of humor to pull it off.

Who's THE BOSS

The latest Melissa McCarthy comedy, The Boss, is the sort of disaster you wouldn’t wish on even the worst movie star. That it happened to one as refreshing and funny as McCarthy is bad. That she did it to herself – co-writing with her husband Ben Falcone, who also directs, as he did her underrated Tammy – is even worse. The movie is a mess of squandered potential, with no sense of rhythm or timing, fatally hobbled by a completely unfocused plot, cursed with a scattershot tone and a complete inability to figure out what story it’s telling. It’s baffling how something so endlessly idiotic and catastrophically unfunny could happen to a talented comedian making her own role. She plays Michelle Darnell, a mean, short-tempered, delusional, narcissistic tycoon sent to jail for insider trading, then forced to work her way back up from nothing. This could be an interesting set-up, but the movie completely misunderstands McCarthy’s sweet and salty appeal, asking her to be both a relentlessly cruel insult machine whirling through every scene and yet still benefit from heaping globs of sentimentality asking us to care about this monster.

You’d think our current political moment would be great timing for a satire about a raging egomaniacal wealthy person metaphorically kicked in the teeth and forced to try to be a good person. In its broad strokes The Boss is exactly that. But it never actually figures out how to make Darnell into a character that makes any sort of sense, or how to make the story cohere around any sort of point. Is she the butt of the joke or the hero of the story? Is she the target of merciless class critique or a benevolent dummy who has had some hard times and needs our rooting interest through her every pratfall? She’s both an out-of-touch nincompoop in a fish-out-of-water comedy – crashing on the sofa of her former assistant (Kristen Bell) and completely misunderstanding the lifestyle of the 99% – and a selfish madwomen tearing through every scene creating more destruction – physically, emotionally, financially – than any other character can believably tolerate. No one knows what to do with her, on screen or behind the scenes.

Take, for instance, Darnell’s wardrobe. She’s always wearing turtlenecks with collars sitting snug just below her ears. That seems like a joke, maybe even a running joke. But nothing ever becomes of this costume choice. It just sits there, drawing a little bit of attention without turning into something entertaining. That’s the movie in a microcosm, which stumbles and flails for purpose. The story seems to skip a beat with every scene transition. Maybe it was hacked together from a pile of half-finished scenes in the editing process. One minute Darnell is ruining her assistant’s life, the next they’re starting a new business together. Sometimes we see a Girl Scout-ish troop, where Darnell cruelly terrorizes nice, clueless moms (Kristen Schaal and Annie Mumolo). Then Kathy Bates shows up for a moment on a farm. Then there’s a weird rivalry with a business competitor (Peter Dinklage) that turns into a last-minute heist. There is also, in a desperate search for more narrative, an underutilized rom-com subplot, a Gayle King cameo, strained misunderstandings, and a sword fight on the top of a skyscraper.

The Boss just doesn’t know what it wants to be. Characters change on the whims of the inconsistent tone, sometimes mean-spirited and nasty – like an over-the-top brawl involving 10-year-olds – and sometimes too sweet – like a tearful apology that’s supposed to be the emotional climax but plays totally false. It doesn’t help a borderline incoherent plot shoved into agonizingly conventional formula that the behaviors of people involved are completely unbelievable, even giving them the benefit of the heightened comedic doubt. There are several moments where McCarthy spits meaningless insults at characters we’ve hardly met, then finishes the scene by, say, falling down a flight of stairs or shoving cookies down someone’s pants. It’s just inexplicable, a disorganized, slapdash, inconsistent effort, stylistically bland to the point of madness, containing only totally unreadable substance. What an unfortunate mess, disappointing and tedious misery passing for humor. It’s not unusual for a custom-made star vehicle to crash and burn, but it’s pretty rare for one to run out of gas before it even hits the road. It hurts to see such likable people involved in a misfire this bad.

Smell of Success: JOY

Joy is an inventive young woman with her dreams on hold, a real George Bailey with no angel coming to her rescue. She’s single-handedly holding her family together at the expense of her own ambitions. She wants to make useful things, objects that’ll be admired and owned by everyone, but in reality she’s stuck in a dead-end minimum wage job, having skipped college to help her parents. They’re all just barely getting by. But, when inspiration strikes, she scrapes together her courage and resources to build a prototype of a self-wringing mop. (It’s also machine washable, a nice feature.) This Miracle Mop could be her ticket to success. A capitalist parable as feminist empowerment, David O. Russell’s Joy, loosely based on the real mop’s inventor, is the sort of story we’re used to seeing men enact. Take Citizen Kane, or The Godfather, or countless other canonical classics of business acumen and its costs. But here the narrative is a woman’s, a perspective that’s long existed in this area, but gone woefully underrepresented in movies like this.

We meet Joy through the eyes of her grandmother (Diane Ladd), a kind and encouraging woman who tells her little granddaughter that she’ll do great things with her life. Ladd narrates the film, giving it a slightly unreal glow, like a heartfelt business biography picture book read with grandmotherly warmth. By the time Joy is a young woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence), she’s trying to run a sprawling, eccentric household with meager emotional and financial support. Her mother (Virginia Madsen) is a soap opera addict who stays in bed all day. Her father (Robert De Niro), a small-business owner long divorced from her mom, was kicked out of his latest wife’s place and moved into the family’s basement. That’s also where Joy’s ex-husband (Édgar Ramírez) lives, unable to afford his own house on a mostly-unemployed lounge singer’s income. They have two young kids who are caught up in this harried maelstrom of chaotic family life, including a condescending step-aunt (Elisabeth Rohm) who offers criticisms but little help.

Lawrence’s commanding performance – her best grown-up role yet – is driven with determination. In the opening scenes of family drama she’s harried, rushing around trying to fix everyone else’s problems – from cleaning up spills and planning kids’ days to ripping up floorboards and working on the plumbing – while trying to make ends meet. Once she decides to try to bring her invention to market, she ignites her frazzled energy into swaggering determination, albeit still cut through with self-doubt and ever-present financial and familial pressures. She’s too motivated to quit, gambling on her skills and talents. As a result, she’ll either end up wealthy or bankrupt. There’s not much room for middle ground in this endeavor. The film is an intimate American epic of domestic chambers and boardrooms, factory floors and TV soundstages, as she tries to get her mop manufactured and selling. Failure is definitely an option, and Lawrence brings a great energy, halfway between self-confidence and nagging doubts, as she strides into difficult situations.

The entrepreneur’s dream is not an easy one. She’s just as likely to be ground under by others who don’t share her vision, or who view her as an easy target. Joy’s story may come from the Shark Tank business school, or Horatio Alger stories, but her lean in isn’t uncomplicated. Russell, working from a script by Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids), creates a film keenly aware of the razor’s edge, the stomach-dropping plunges into debt as Joy struggles to get taken seriously, gain recognition, avoid getting taken advantage of, and realize her product’s potential. (That Russell fought Mumolo for writing credit on such a story is a sad irony.) Joy finds her family a doubting chorus, and everyone in the business world trying to be a bigger success, a more glamorous person, thinking they can get there through hard work and delusion. A buyer (Bradley Cooper) sees himself as a studio mogul. A wealthy widow (Isabella Rossellini) thinks her inheritance is a measure of her business savvy. Money is essential, but getting it is not a panacea.

Intermingling paperwork, finances, factories, and salespeople with family squabbles and pains, Russell stages scenes with a variety of moving plot parts and competing characters’ motivations in close-quarters drama played at comedy speed. Russell specializes in ragged and heightened amusing melodramas about squabbling families (Flirting with Disaster, Silver Linings Playbook, The Fighter). Unlike his last film, the pretty, but fundamentally phony American Hustle, he keeps Joy’s comic and dramatic incidents spinning through a variety of tempos and film stocks, making its inconsistency its consistency, animating Joy’s sense of hard-charging ambition and precarious insecurities. Intensely felt with a booming soundtrack of unexpected needle-drops and smooth, emphatic camera movements (director of photography Linus Sandgren dancing amongst the lively cast), the unusually unstructured story (a conventional three-act structure told with a loose rambling quality) pushes forward with relentless momentum. I was invested in its medley of tones and terrifically sympathetic hero from her first frame.

Tidily untidy on the surface – with theatrical flourishes, elaborate visual metaphors, dream sequences, flashbacks, cameos, and even a musical number – Joy takes, well, joy in broad characters and boisterous performances, showy filmmaking and layered writing. I found it gripping and moving, an involving business story smashed up against an affecting family drama, peppered with lovely touches – a warm voice from beyond the grave, an exquisite Christmassy sales call montage, a low-key mother/daughter bond over crayons and blueprints, and a dance of fake snow flurries accompanying a strut towards victory intercut with a melancholy flash-forward. It captures the real and unreal aspects of self-mythology, the inherent falseness of singular up-from-bootstraps triumph, and the odd flukes that lead to both setbacks and success.

Joy emerges as a great character, an exhausted woman always with a stain on her blouse from helping others, who decides to become something more, slowly coming alive and into her own in the spotlight. The movie surrounds her with endlessly entertaining complications, and great actors (each a total delight) wonderfully filling in their characters’ eccentricities and peculiarities. Funny and moving, exciting and sad, it sees the promise and artifice of the American dream, and the fortuitous incongruities (like a shopping network in the middle of Amish country) that can lead to accomplishment. It simultaneously celebrates her hard-working attempt to turn her great idea into a big business, and also realizes money won’t fix her family’s problems.

Something Blue: BRIDESMAIDS

While the plot is set in motion by the announcement of an upcoming wedding, Bridesmaids is anything but a typical wedding comedy. It focuses not on the couple – the groom, in fact, has barely a line of dialogue in the entire picture – but on female relationships instead. It’s directed by Paul Feig (creator of Freaks and Geeks) and produced by Judd Apatow, but the true auteur here is Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote the film with her friend Annie Mumolo and stars as the maid of honor. This is a sometimes very crude R-rated film in which women are allowed to be raunchy and rowdy, to be both beautiful and silly, even in the same instant. It’s a broad comedy with nicely observed friendships and competitions between these recognizably human characters.

In the film, Wiig plays a woman whose longtime best friend (Maya Rudolph) is happily ready to be married. But, unfortunately, Wiig’s life happens to be falling apart. Closer to 40 than 30, she has a failed business, a dead-end physical relationship with an emotionally distant jerk (Jon Hamm), and two deeply strange roommates (Rebel Wilson and Matt Lucas) who would very much like it if she could either pay the rent or move out. Her mom (the late Jill Clayburgh in her final role) isn’t much help. That last thing Wiig wants to do is move back in with her mother, but that seems to be an increasingly necessary option.

She clings to her relationship with her soon-to-be-married friend, even as it picks up a slight strain under the pressure of the impending ceremony. Weddings can be expensive and are full of situations ripe with the potential for massive social embarrassment. Wiig plays a woman completely unprepared for this stress, especially with the added strain that comes in the form of Rudolph’s new friend (Rose Byrne), a wealthy, glamorous lady for whom party planning and social graces seem to come naturally. It’s clear from the moment that their characters first meet that Wiig and Byrne are on a collision course.

The film walks through the various events leading up to the big day, from an engagement party to dress fittings, the bachelorette party and a wedding shower. At every turn, events get weird. Propriety breaks down. Strange faux pas pop up. Feelings get hurt. Along for the ride are the rest of the bridesmaids, a naïve newlywed (Ellie Kemper) thoroughly dazzled by the concept of a wedding, a weary mother (Wendi McLendon-Covey) who evokes the state of her chaotic household by mentioning that the other day she broke a blanket in half, and a jolly goofball (Melissa McCarthy) who seems to grow ever more cheerfully strange with each passing scene.

This is a comedy with several great scenes, the kind of hilarious moments that provoke squirm-in-the-seat, tears-down-the-face, jagged-breathing laughter. There’s an engagement party toast that becomes a slow build of increasing hilarity, as it becomes an elaborate game of one-upmanship between Wiig and Byrne. There’s a pristine, glowing, high-end dress shop which is the perfect setting for a sequence of unbelievably, hilariously gross mass gastrointestinal crisis (“I need to get off this white carpet!”). There’s a flight to a bachelorette party destination that becomes the perfect enclosed space for a jittery flyer to devolve into crazier and loopier goofiness. These sequences start small and are allowed to build momentum until part of the humor is that the embarrassment is still going on.

Through all of these moments, the very funny cast of scene-stealers keeps stealing scenes out from under each other, but Wiig looms large above them all. She has a rubbery elasticity, not just to her face and physicality, but to her emotional state as well. She’s a normal person with a life that’s falling apart, being slowly driven insane by extra pressures of social situations going horribly awry. It’s very comical, but what makes it all the more funny is that it’s built upon believable character relationships. Wiig and Rudolph have an unforced naturalness that seems to spring from a real, deep friendship. Wiig and Byrne clash in ways that feel specifically truthful in the passive-aggressive ways they play out. (There’s even a sweet romance between Wiig and a lovely cop played by Chris O’Dowd that is surprising in both its effectiveness and its relative lack of screen time).

Unlike terrible recent wedding-themed comedies that are, at least partially, about female friendships, like Bride Wars, which plays like some man’s awfully reductive and retrograde concept of how women relate to one another, Bridesmaids is a comedy by women and benefits from the sparks of truth that drive the story. It’s a bit long, sometimes uneven, but it more than makes up for it by laying out convincing groundwork for sequences of high flying vulgarity that occasionally turns into complete and total comic pleasure.