McCarthyism

Melissa McCarthy's Tammy has a fiddled-with timidity that you can often feel in movies that are trying way too hard to please, that have been manufactured by a committee of executives and creatives who have nothing to prove but that they and their products are successful by design.  Which is very funny because McCarthy's spirit and ascendancy seem to be the exact opposite of the executive/creative merger.  Her major gift is the celebration of freakishness, spliced with empathy and complete abandon.  In Bridesmaids, Identity Thief, and The Heat, and on SNL, she embodies idiocy and  a sort of needy kindness that hasn't really been mined before by other comedians/actors/performance-artists so skillfully and with such richly hilarious results.  She does not "clean up" her performances or make then palatable, and yet they still have a soft center, an attention to detail, and an access point that seems culled through complete and total dedication to making the peripheral central, or in Flannery O'Connor's words (words I always go back to):  the freak becomes a form of essential displacement for all those upstanding self-righteous folks who feel the need to categorize people into freak/non-freak.  We are in that zone of outlandish behavior, obesity, stupidity, etcetera, and yet there is no judgment and no relief.  McCarthy, when she's doing it right, allows us all to occupy that territory as if it is our own, thanks to her unbridled connection and performance.  She takes one-note and spins it into a symphony.

That orchestration is messed with in Tammy, so much so the results are devastatingly awful, not because the character is not worthy of our attention but because McCarthy and her co-writer and husband Ben Falcone have created a story (a road movie) for her to occupy that is so vapid and unoriginal and just plain uninteresting that Tammy becomes a sort of flaccid float in a sad little parade in which everyone else seems so totally normal, bland and un-alive there's nothing to bounce off of.  There is nothing to celebrate.  And the freakishness on display seems to come from some need to please; the first fifteen minutes of this sucker is like a Jerry-Lewis-dumb-ass riff, with McCarthy marching around doing her big-lady-id dance without any partners.  Without that, she comes off as a pariah, which I hope is the exact opposite of McCarthy's moral and artistic intentions. 

Maybe this is one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for situations.  Tammy I've read was a dream project for McCarthy and Falcone.  The dream maybe was to expand McCarthy's territory more toward Alexander Payne's territory of drama and comedy blissfully and absurdly intersecting in road movies that capture a tenderness beneath chaos, selfishness and torpor.  In Sideways, About Schmidt and this year's Nebraska, Payne explores freakish sad-sack-on-the-lam behavior with a stylishness that underpins the pathos without losing the laughs.  McCarthy and Falcone lose both in almost every scene of their flick, and while Tammy does propel forward with that road-movie conceit (Tammy and her drunk grandma played with pedestrian mousiness by Susan Sarandon flee the scene together in search of Niagara Falls) it's stuck inside a sort of bubble of confusion and nervousness:  please laugh at this sadness and stupidity.  Please. 

June Squibb is the shit.  She plays the bitter, foulmouthed old wife to Bruce Dern's white-trash Don Quixote in Payne's Nebraska, and while the movie isn't solely about her, Squibb takes control through an overstated understatedness.  She does outrageous acts (including showing her bloomers in a graveyard to the tombstone of an old boyfriend, and nonchalantly opining that she's going to stick old Dern in a home if she ever wins a fortune), but she is nestled within a movie that allows her freakishness to bloom into empathy and even a little salvation.  In the end she isn't really heroic, but the old bat does have her say, and she does rescue her husband from all the buzzard relatives who think he's won a million bucks.  Squibb is relentless because she has a world to occupy and the good sense to let it flow and the courage to know that she's on target. 

McCarthy and Falcone may want to watch Nebraska a couple more times before they make another movie.

Number One Freak

 

 

Melissa McCarthy's performance in Identity Thief made me cry.  I wasn't really prepared for that kind of response.   Almost every review I read about the movie panned it, although almost everyone praised McCarthy's chops, as well as the chops of Jason Bateman, her co-star.  Identity Thief is truly a piece of crap, a retread of all kinds of comedy tropes (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, What about Bob, anything with Adam Sandler and/or Kevin James) that finds endless merriment in the overly obvious juxtaposing of freak and non-freak.  The premise is uptight family guy gets his identity robbed by a morbidly obese sociopath who wears tacky clothes.   These two opposing forces are forced together on a road-trip in order to prove something or other.  Truly the whole plot is preposterous (you keep wanting Bateman's character to just say fuck it and call his bank and do what anybody else does when this happens:  cancel his card and move on), and the machinations and motivations become so muddy you can't really tell what is what after a while. 

 

And yet there's McCarthy making me cry. 

 

I think it has something to do with how gungho she takes this character on.  The titular identity thief is a total concatenation of stereotypes, a fat, lonely, greedy, mentally-ill hoarder who likes to punch people in their throats when they get in her way and who has a sadsack back-story that may or may not be true.  McCarthy gives this cartoon a shadow-life with her eyes and her way of moving through space gracefully and authoritatively, as if she is dancing her way past the movie's cheap laughs in order to find a way to destroy your heart.  This happens most intensely in a couple scenes for me -- one in which Bateman catches her holding his daughter's hand, and in another when we first meet up with her at a bar where she's buying everyone drinks.  In both scenes, which bookend the movie, McCarthy conveys a sort of innocence that's based on an understanding that no matter how stupid the movie gets the main character she's playing is for real.  McCarthy makes this freak a transcendent freak, a full-fledged heart-broken criminal trying to steal her way out of herself.  In other words, McCarthy plays the character as a stand-in for all of us, so that Bateman's upstanding citizen seems like the cipher, when probably the movie itself was constructed to do the opposite. 

 

Kathy Bates did the same thing in a movie called Misery back in the day.  She invested all her abilities in making a fat, lonely, creepy, backwoods kidnapper/torturer into someone you could connect to on the most beautiful levels.  I remember when I first saw that movie I was devastated, not because in the end she was vanquished but because her vanquishing seemed morally wrong.  The plot of that flick is a Stephen-King potboiler about a romance writer imprisoned by his biggest and craziest fan, played by Bates.  James Caan plays the writer, and he is intended as the movie's central figure, representing good common sense.  So when Bates' freak takes a sledgehammer to his legs you're supposed to feel completely violated.  However Bates does the sledgehammer scene, and all her other scenes, with such verve and attentiveness and truth you feel connected to her need to smash knee-caps.  That's the common sense in this moral universe:  kneecap smashing.  Her transgressions became the norm, not because the movie wants it that way but because Bates does it that way.

 

The same thing happens in Identity Thief.  And it's a joyous experience.  Not because the movie is great, but because someone in it is greater than she should have been.   



 

Butch Freak Goddess

Bridesmaids, the new Kristen Wiig chick-flick/raunch-comedy that came out last week, is a total pleasure to experience:  smart, heartfelt, and silly, with a sidecar of Brazilian-food diarrhea.  It has its own rhythm and pace, guided by Wiig's eerie, brilliant comedic timing.  Wiig's setpieces are like elongated SNL sketches, only better because Wiig and the filmmakers have created an atmosphere in which the creepy/zany sketch-comedy routines are braided into an overall narrative that satisfies your inner-fratboy, while also allowing you to catch the bridal bouquet.  It's Mary Richards and Rhoda climbing on board the Farelly Brothers train to Apatow Junction. 

But truly the main reason I love this movie is Melissa McCarthy's Butch Freak Goddess Megan, sister of the groom.  In the beginning of Bridesmaids, at the initial engagement party, Megan is a total throwaway cliche, one of those goofy grotesques comedic movies often trot out for cheap laughs and also to get us to "like" the main character by comparison.  She's all huff and puff and dyke-like moves, dressed in boy clothes, overexcited and a little stalker-scary.

As the movie progresses, though, Megan stops being the butt of jokes and transforms into its moral center.  McCarthy hams it up in a way that isn't hammy somehow, providing breathing room for Megan's innocence and intelligence.  One of the best images in the movie is of Megan abducting nine puppies from the bridal shower (it's a site-gag:  the party is so plush that parting gifts are gorgeous, pedigreed little doggies).  She's in her minivan, puppies all over the place, driving like mad to get home.

Megan is also the slap-in-the-face Wigg's Annie needs to get over her funk.  In this scene, we find out how accomplished and how triumphant Megan really is.  We can see her work her magic.  Only in this bell-jar of chick-flick-raunch-comedy weirdness, I'm thinking, could such a wonderfully full but still hilariously broad character be hatched.  McCarthy is blissfully unaware of her looks, and yet there's an inherent beauty pulsing out of Megan's hungry eyes. 

Of course there's the food-poisoning in a wedding-dress schtick and lots of Wiiginess, all of which is spectacular.  But at the end of the day, Megan feels like something new:  a masculine, overweight, kind of freaky lady unapologetically in charge of her life.

Hog Heaven

CBS's Mike and Molly is neo-Roseanne:  a working-class sitcom that finds its metaphors and purpose in the beautifully ironic predicament of obesity and activity, being fat and being overworked and being in love.  I just saw a repeat of the Thanksgiving episode -- it was my first Mike and Molly experience -- and I was in hog heaven.  The two leads, Billy Gardell and Melissa McCarthy, have a banter and chemistry hardly ever seen on TV.  They don't preen or pose ala Friends or all the imitators of Friends.  They actually have a strange familiarity, a language first created for Dan and Roseanne in that preeminent 80s/90s working-class sitcom, one of the first representations of working-class fatties that didn't make dumb jokes at their expense, but allowed the jokes to come from the mouths of the fatties:  tired, mean spirited but ultimately gorgeously moral put downs and asides that allowed the tired and depressed and over-weight a voice and a flare. 

Mike and Molly's style evolves from that Roseanne-fat-ass-venom.  But this is also a love story at its core:  Mike and Molly are courting, and their love is both innocent and worn out.  And when push comes to shove, Molly, a school teacher with papers to grade, makes jokes about Mike's sleep-apnea machine, and Mike, a cop with boyish charm to spare, finds solace in someone who understands him enough to make jokes about his sleep-apnea machine.

Mike and Molly are trying to escape a universe of skinny people, it seems:  trying to find a way out of being gazed-upon as freaks.

Which is a great segue into the whole Marie Clare controversy from back in the fall.  A bitchy Marie Clare editor wrote a blog about Mike and Molly in which she penned crap like: "I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other ... because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything." 

This show is a direct assault on skinny bitches.  And also on the way we tend to try to overlook what makes us human.  We want perfection given to us often so we can validate hating ourselves.  Mike and Molly allows us a respite from that. "Skinny bitches" are often the punchlines on this show.  The gaze is not on their side.  And really what the hell is wrong with that?