By Preston Wilder
I have some issues with toilet humour in comedies. Most of the time it seems crude, a cheap easy laugh, and needlessly gross into the bargain. (I remember the years when vomiting in movies meant an actor pretending to retch over a toilet-bowl, at least till some special-effects guy managed to create convincing fake puke and suddenly we got streams of goo oozing out at every opportunity.) You’d think I’d have a problem, therefore, with the scene in Bridesmaids where five young women come down with food-poisoning while trying on bridesmaid’s dresses in a dress shop. One lady vomits copiously; another climbs up onto the wash-basin, hitches up her skirt and lets fly; another – having tried and failed to get to the toilet across the road – simply sits down in the street, still in her lovely bridal dress, and starts to defecate.
The film’s glee in all this puking and shitting is slightly depressing – yet the scene is funny, because the fifth young woman (our heroine Annie, played by Kristen Wiig) resolutely refuses to admit she’s been poisoned. She’s the one who chose the Brazilian restaurant that served them the bad food; even worse, her rival Helen (Rose Byrne), being rich, svelte and perfect, didn’t have any meat at the restaurant, so she’s perfectly fine. Annie can’t admit to Helen that her restaurant idea was a fiasco – so instead she smiles and holds it in, even as she’s shivering and sweating like a pig. Looks like those other girls have the ’flu, shrugs Annie. Who, me? No, I feel fine. Poisoned? Not at all. Actually, I’m hungry. Sugared almond? Why thank you, I will have a sugared almond. Meanwhile, in the ladies’ room, all hell is breaking loose – and the more extreme it gets, the funnier it gets, not because it’s gross but because of the contrast. Bridesmaids takes a scene that looks puerile on paper – and looked awful in the film’s trailer – and actually turns it into comedy.
This has been called a female version of The Hangover, being another jape about things going wrong in the run-up to a wedding – though it’s typical of the film’s self-deprecation that these ladies never even get to Vegas, ending up instead in Casper, Wyoming after Annie tries to overcome her fear of flying with an unwise combination of pills and booze and gets them thrown off the plane. Bridesmaids is also a wedding-com, that rancid genre – but in fact Wiig (who also co-wrote) doesn’t dwell on the wedding, building instead a Woody Allen-ish relationship comedy about a lonely single woman assailed by an unreasonable world.
Annie isn’t technically single, but she might as well be. Her boyfriend of sorts (Jon Hamm) is a vain Lothario who calls her his “f*** buddy” and has rules about sleeping over. “This is so awkward,” he says on the rare morning when she manages to wake up beside him: “I really want you to leave, but I don’t know how to say it without sounding like a dick” – then smiles winningly, as if he expects her to be charmed by his dickishness. Annie lives with two roommates, a corpulent British brother and sister (the brother played by Matt Lucas, from Little Britain) who go through her things and generally behave outrageously. Her boss at the jewellery store flirts with a girl called Kahlua and demands that Annie “show me your ‘Love is Eternal’ face”. Above all, being alone hangs heavy on our heroine. In one scene, she bakes a little cupcake with infinite care, decorates it beautifully – then looks at it for a moment, as if wondering what the point was, and dolefully eats it herself. At the engagement party (where she meets her fellow bridesmaids), people keep assuming that she’s with whatever random creepy man happens to be standing next to her – as if being alone were too awful to be even contemplated.
Like The Company Men [see opposite page], albeit not so overtly, Bridesmaids is also a recession movie. The bride’s father frets that he can’t afford the wedding. Helen the rival is rich, and her conspicuous consumption – mansions, servants, trips to Paris – is part of what makes her loathsome. Annie is explicitly a victim of the recession, having lost her business (a cake shop), which led in turn to losing her boyfriend and hence to her current funk. Yet it’s also more than that. Unlike The Hangover, which is rowdy and exuberant, Bridesmaids seems to have a touch of recession in its DNA.
There’s comedy of embarrassment and desperation here, cringe-making bits like Annie and Helen trying to one-up each other with duelling speeches at the engagement party. There’s a definite class angle, the flight to Vegas – the film’s funniest scene – hinging on the fact that Helen flies first-class while Annie flies economy. There’s a welcome melancholy streak to these unhappy people, lonely Annie, hollow Helen, mannish bridesmaid Megan (Melissa McCarthy, the film’s secret weapon), Rita the married bridesmaid with three young sons in the gross throes of puberty (“Last week I cracked a blanket IN HALF,” she recalls with a kind of disgusted awe). The recession doesn’t last, of course. There’s a sweet romance with an Irish cop, and a proper happy ending. And of course all the toilet humour. But that works too, somehow.
