Maid to Order

There was a lot of critical buzz earlier this year around the comedy Bridesmaids. Some of the talk simply focused on the quality of the film. Others trumpeted it as a sign that, "see? Female-driven comedies can succeed at the box office; the sexist notion of comedy as a man's game should be dispensed with." Well, that second notion is clearly true. But regardless, how is the film itself?

Well, in my opinion, not bad. It's a simple buddy premise, where a woman with her life in relative shambles is asked by her best friend to be the maid of honor at her wedding. As the woman is barely able to hold her own life together, her efforts to plan all the festivities that conventionally lead up to a wedding are predictably chaotic. And rather funny.

Kristen Wiig is the star of the film, and anchors it wonderfully. Her comedy is razor-sharp, and she's a likeable protagonist you want to root for. The supporting cast is just as strong. Maya Rudolph is great as the bride-to-be, and effectively plays a realistic and normal person, quite unlike her Saturday Night Live characters (or her current Oprah parody on Up All Night). Rose Byrne, so great in the drama of the TV show Damages, proves equally skilled here at comedy. Melissa McCarthy, now an Emmy winner for Mike and Molly, is powerful. Ellie Kemper, always a strong supporter on The Office, is just as strong here.

When a good scene hits its stride in this film, it delivers solid belly laughs. You'll laugh, you'll cringe; it's great stuff. But the weakness of the movie is that oftentimes, the scenes take a while to hit that stride. The movie clocks in at 2 hours and 5 minutes. That's a ponderous length for a comedy, really; most top out an an hour and 45 minutes, tops, and there's a good reason for that. Slow pace is the death of comedy.

The director and editor needed to cut around 20 minutes out of the movie. And it's not even that I'd suggest they cut the "non-funny" parts. The movie actually had a nice sweetness to it, and that sentiment is a large part of what makes it work overall. But if they'd just trim a bit off the front (and some off the back) of almost every scene, a tighter film would result.

For example, there's a sequence on an airplane as the bachelorette party flies to Vegas. It does deliver plenty of laughs -- but only after nearly five minutes of relatively unfunny setup. Or take a sequence near the end of the movie, where Kristen Wiig's character is trying to get the attention of her cop boyfriend by committing traffic violations in front of his patrol car. She drives by him perhaps 8 or 9 times, each time with a different joke. We'd have appreciated the scene just fine if they'd just stuck with maybe the three best gags.

But even though the movie does often have to build back up the pace that it itself deflates, it never fails to indeed build that pace back up. Bridesmaids is a keeper overall, and worth catching if you haven't already. I grade it a B.