Barb and Star go to the Vista Del Mar review: like a refreshing beach vacation

After watching the Bill and Ted films last year for the first time (I know!), I wrote about how much I appreciate that kind of sweet eccentricity in comedies – the kind of story ideas you just can’t imagine a filmmaker launching today, let alone a studio executive giving green light . The studio comedies of the 1990s are, on the whole, significantly stranger than the ever-decreasing number of comedies on offer so far in the 2020s (up to and including everything that starred Will Ferrell). The characters are strange; situations are more implausible; the jokes are more eccentric, more aimed at a niche audience. And I miss them.

So Bill and Ted: Meet Barb and Star, the dynamic duo at the center of one of the strangest and most delicious modern comedies to hit – well, normally I would say “big screen”, but the movie is not starting a screen-friendly era big. Your TV screen, then. Like last year’s weird but fun Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar he suffers a little because he cannot watch him in a room full of people prepared to laugh and snort between his jokes. But it’s still a lot of fun.

Lionsgate

The singing title announces the tone of the film: This is the story of two middle-aged ladies who go to Florida for fun in the sun and, inevitably, some adventures. These women are played, respectively, by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig, who also wrote the film (directed by Josh Greenbaum). The last effort of the Mumolo and Wiig team, a decade ago, was the great success Bridesmaids. This film generated a lot of talk about comedies centered on women, especially the rough ones. (It also made a lot of money.)

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar it does not seem destined to detonate anything so shaking; you’re really here just for fun and sunbathing. Barb and Star are longtime best friends who work together at Jennifer Convertibles (you know, the sofa store) in a shopping mall in the Midwest. They are also roommates since Barb’s husband died and Star’s husband left, sleeping in single beds in the same room, in the style of Bert and Ernie. They belong to a “Talking Club” led by a friend named Debbie (Vanessa Bayer, in an incredible performance) and make “hot dog soup” for their guests when it is time to introduce them.

But one day they abruptly lost their jobs because, as their sad manager says, the company Jennifer Convertibles closed months earlier, but no one remembered to tell them. Loose and a little untied, they have a casual encounter with an acquaintance who has just returned from a transformative vacation in a distant land: the small seaside town of Vista Del Mar, Florida. Barb and Star have never left the house before. But throwing caution to the wind, they decide to travel there in search of rest and adventure.

There is a second story in the film too, centered on a dark villain with a strange vengeance against Vista Del Mar. Also played by Wiig, channeling Tilda Swinton, the character is rooted in childhood cartoon traumas, and she is ready to launch an attack on the city. Her lover, a young goof named Edgar (Jamie Dornan), is ready to carry out his orders, and he is also in Vista Del Mar. When he meets Barb and Star at the hotel bar, things start to get pretty wild.

A familiar model: two innocents “abroad” accidentally stumble on a plan to destroy the world and inadvertently frustrate it. Except that the plot has significantly less urgency for life and death than the destruction of the world, and Barb and Star are not rude; they are very happy to do what they are doing. These low stakes are their own kind of meta-joke, in a world where apparently every movie is about a villain or another trying to destroy humanity.

Lionsgate

And yet the plot of Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar it is almost irrelevant. Wiig and Mumolo are predictably hilarious, with wigs and a perfect wardrobe (Barb and Star are so obsessed with breeches that the film starts with a text that gives the dictionary definition of that very particular item of clothing). A sequence in which women spend the entire flight by plane talking about their conception of a perfect woman whom they dubbed “Trish” follows an established principle of comedy: first, the joke is slightly funny; then it starts to creep; then, suddenly, he becomes hysterical.

And the film is loaded with bizarre little flourishes that literally make him sing. There are two complete numbers of music and dance in this film – just two, not enough to make it a musical film, but two more than you would find in an ordinary film, which means it goes into a kind of film – mysterious musical valley. There are positively delicious cameos that I won’t spoil. There is a great love for the type of jewelery based on shells that you buy in a cart on the beach and cocktails that provide that special hangover from three holidays, from rum and the sugar and the food coloring.

And above all, there’s Jamie Dornan, who is so perfectly cast that it’s a joke to himself. He is, of course, incredibly beautiful, and also Irish, traits that go a long way in achieving “object of desire” status anyway. But he’s also Jamie Dornan, even better known for playing Christian Gray on Fifty Shades films, and that means he’s a perfect synecdoche for the middle-aged female desire, whether he’s longing for the villain who is taking advantage of him or dancing in the sand and singing to the gulls.

Because, yes, Barb and Star want it, and more broadly, they just like things like flirting, sex and handsome men. It’s a fact; they use words like “lips” without wavering and are not ashamed of sex. Refreshingly – and probably because the script was written by two women in their 40s – Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar she scoffs at the aspects of being a standard middle-aged white lady from the Midwest (fashion mostly), without making women themselves objects of ridicule. They are heroines, in fact, and desirable as well.

Watching Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar it was the closest I’ve come in a long time to feeling like I’m on vacation. I laughed, mostly, and laughed a little, and managed to get out of life for a while without the feeling of leaving my brain at the door. A little break and a little adventure and a lot of clever jokes that border on the bizarre: This, for me, is a recipe for fun.

Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar debuts on demand services like Google Play and Amazon Prime Video on February 12.