The women of Bridesmaids, the new film starring Kristin Wiig of Saturday Night Live fame, are not classy. They swear. They talk candidly about their sex lives. They fart. They have no shame in being single while participating in an event that celebrates a departure from the single life. And, in one scene involving a bad bout with food poisoning, they vomit at a prissy bridal boutique.
In other words, these women—who include Wiig, fellow SNL-er Maya Rudolph, Wendi McLendon-Covey of Reno 911!, Melissa McCarthy of Mike and Molly, Ellie Kemper of The Office, and Rose Byrne of Damages—are demonstrating that you don’t need to be Will Ferrell, Seth Rogan, or Jonah Hill to lead a foulmouthed R-rated comedy to success. The movie, which opened on Friday, earned a second-place finish at the box office this weekend with $24.4 million. It tells the story of planning Rudolph’s character’s wedding, with Wiig at the helm as the maid of honor.
The film, co-written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo, is produced by Judd Apatow, the man behind such hysterically raunchy fare as Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Superbad, and Anchorman. It’s his first film that doesn’t rely on any male leads (which, really, is a rarity for any Hollywood movie). It shows that women can tell a dick joke with the best of the men, and its success really has the potential to usher in a new era of lady-led movies that aren’t just cookie-cutter romantic comedies.
Hopefully, the overwhelmingly positive reviews will help Apatow see that his gut instinct to support this film was a good decision. After all, he did have some doubts. In The New York Times, he gave some insight into the screenwriting process, saying:
We certainly had real debates about whether we were drifting into territory we should leave to the men.
Bridesmaids is also a huge deal because of the demographics it attracted—67 percent of the audience was female, proving once again the power of female viewership. Today, it’s being heralded around the blogosphere as an “overperformer”—something that has “exceeded expectations.” At EW.com, Owen Gleiberman confronts this idea head-on, citing Bridesmaids as yet another reason that film producers should stop finally ignoring the power of female consumers. He wrote:
What the “exceeded expectations” line is really about is the movie industry, and the media, paying homage to the collective “wisdom” that occurs whenever Hollywood, doing that thing it does, remembers all over again, every couple of years, and with great stunned surprise, that there’s this weirdly esoteric, fringe-group demographic—I believe the term for it is “women”—who actually enjoy seeing their lives portrayed on screen every bit as much as men do.
Who knows, maybe Bridesmaids can prompt filmmakers to stop aggressively applying gender to comedy. In a genre where cute jokes and cattiness are typically deemed good for women, while men are allowed to be raunchy and outlandish, let’s hope Bridesmaids can serve as a model for an alternative.
(Photo Suzanne Hanover)
