Revisit: The Unmitigated Brilliance of Bridesmaids and Kristen Wiig.

If I were to have made a list of the best films of the 2010's Bridesmaids would be on it. It’s a movie that drew comparisons to Todd Phillips “The Hangover” , but this was a very superficial connection. Todd Phillips is a very immature director and I mean that in the classical, traditional sense. His films always feel far too driven by impulses with little composure, edge for the sake of itself. The things that happened in the hangover films felt like they came from a point of view, or direction that was like “Michael Keaton egging The Joker on in Tim Burton's “Batman”. “You wanna get crazy?! Lets get crazy!!” Its message and approach to male bonding is basic, juvenile, and much like “Joker” over simplified and barely connected to the story, as in it feels like watching those very violent Saturday morning cartoons like G.I. Joe that had the little message at the end where they said something like “Stay in school,” followed by “Yoooooo JOE!” ...at that point who cares. Bridesmaids is actually from beginning to ending about the absurdity of expectations, the ones we put on ourselves, on our growth, on our relationships, the shit we get ourselves into because of it, and how to step out of it. It's emotionally authentic, and mature, and even the ancillary characters have motivations that feel rooted in truth as well as farce. This is an incredibly thematically acrobatic and difficult feat, one this film accomplishes with an ease similar to 1984's Ghostbusters. Along those same lines, for many of those same reasons, if I were to pick the best scenes of this past decade, the airplane scene from this film would also be amongst the best. It's outrageous, it's temperamental, its hilarious, and it’s phenomenally structured…

The scene is the pinnacle of Bridesmaid's genius.  It’s edited brilliantly to show an upward staircase of unhinged anxiety. Cuts from one part of the plane to another are slowly but surely increased with a frequency that increases as each member becomes more frantic, until it spreads and pops. No one is trying to upstage anyone. Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey could almost form their own movie based off the conversation, improvisation, and chemistry they construct and erect in this scene. Melissa McCarthy is off on a quest for the holy grail of focused zaniness, Rose Byrne's giving a smug smarmy sermon from the book of comedy revelations, and Maya Rudolph is just there trying to keep it all together in a straight man role that shows off her range, and her intellectual, instinctual understanding of comedy. Everyone is on 10, actually no.. Spinal Tap's “11”. But Kristen Wiig, my God Wiig. I've seen this movie several times,  and it was still INCREDIBLY hard to watch this without losing it the entire time. It's small things like in the interaction between her and the (actually great) flight attendant when she puts the shades on. He confronts her, and with an overload of wispy caricature, Wiig simply replies “Ummm no". To big large obvious things like "There's a colonial woman on the wing!”.

It is one of the most farcical and hilarious things I've heard in my life , I can just sit and think on it over and over again and laugh forever. There are levels to it, the first being you recognize the reference (The famous Twilight Zone episode) which already (at least with me) puts a smile on my face. Then she takes it somewhere you wouldn't expect in a million years, ( She was churning butter, I saw her!”) and yet, if you think about the context of the anxiety,  and what it is she might ultimately be afraid, where this comes from, what the institution of marriage, and the expectations anchired to it - it makes pretty damn good sense.  Then there's the commitment to the idea, to resonance, to some true objective with every comedian but Wiig just seems to find levels under the pre-existing levels contorting her face, twisting her mind to slip past the boundaries. Here she ultimately mines a similar level of paranoia as displayed in Shatner's episode.  "There's something they're not telling us!" is the encapsulation of the terror in the seminal Twilight Zone episode, but funneled through Wiig's energetic, frantic, ridiculousness, it gets me every time. Wiig is so connected to every action, every word no matter how far out they are- it bends reality.  With Will Ferrell (who in his prime was also incredibly brilliant to me ) I laughed knowing the farce.  Knowing it couldn't happen,  wouldn't happen,  with Wiig, (because she's always adds a dash of genuine emotion)  right at the site of where the seed of the absurd will grow - I laugh because I believe it could,  despite knowing the likelihood.