On “Saturday Night Live”, the sketch characters arrive, connect with the audience (or not) and reach occasional spikes in popularity, becoming fun creatures and old friends. For a while, beginning in the 1990s, the greatest honor you could bestow on an “SNL” character was that he received his own spin-off film. This era is over (in 2010, “MacGruber” staked his heart), but that was probably a good thing, since most of those films were notoriously lukewarm, successful or unsuccessful.
Now, however, you see original comedies that, at least in spirit, could be spin-offs of “SNL” skits. “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” was one of them. “Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar” is another. Only this one is not bad. Like Barb and Star, a ridiculously fuddy-duddy couple of forties in their early forties from Soft Rock, Nebraska, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo doesn’t exhaust the welcome, and the film, although it has more laughter than laughter, doesn’t feel padded. It’s the absurd and brilliant offshoot these non-but-could-have-been-sketch comedy characters deserve, and it seems, in their modestly intelligent and fun way, right.
Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) are enthusiastic kids from the Midwest who work at Jennifer Convertibles – which is not funny, although the funny thing is that they think it is an exciting job. They treat the place as their second home, and I mean it literally. They talk about coffee on the couch; they will sneak in during Thanksgiving to offer a holiday dinner. At first, they look like twins, or variations of the same person, dressed in matching cardigans with flowery shirts, their hair curled in unofficial and curly poufs that remind Jane Fonda of “Nine to Five” or Marcia Wallace in “The Bob Newhart Show. “
They are like the chattering queens of the klatsch café, their conversation a loud attack of maniacally cheerful and almost paralyzing banality. They’ll say things like “For me, a woman named Trish is a woman you can count on!” or “The air smells different here!” “You’re right! It smells like red lobster!” And they put a happy face on everything, with their exaggerated boosterism from the student council. They are affected and cautious, they never had an unconventional thought, and they are so soft that they are the essence of a good normal-as-a-good-American oddity. They make Romy and Michelle look cool. They may be the most arrogant team of optimists since Bob and Doug McKenzie of SCTV.
So, why don’t you exhaust your welcome in five minutes? Because Wiig and Mumolo, coming together as screenwriters for the first time since the great “Bridesmaids” (2011), have put enough of a vision of life on the margins of these two women who think Mr. Peanut is sexy and Don Cheadle is pronounced “Chee-adle”, who treat a night in a bar as a walk through the wild side, and who consider the use of breeches as something close to piety. (This film does for culottes what “Wayne’s World” did for Queen.) Much of the male comedy was built around spectacularly exaggerated messy losers. Barb and Star are outrageously stylish, cheerful and homely losers. There is a humanity closed to its ridicule.
Early on, they discover that the furniture store they work in is closing, leaving them without a job – and, in a funny way, without identity. As Barb sums up his situation, “We will find another job. This city is full of places looking to hire women in their 40s! ”Barb is a widow, Star is divorced and none of them have had a date since; they didn’t even leave the city. So when a friend returned from her vacation, when they were told about a small white sand oasis on the Florida coast called Vista Del Mar, they decided to make a week-long getaway there. How aware are they of the ways of the new world? Neither has a cell phone, and for the trip, Barb packs “traveler’s checks left over from my wedding.”
When they arrive at the Palm Vista Hotel and are greeted by a music production that seems to be the highlight of their lives, they are sure that they have landed in paradise. Turns out they should be on Palm Vista Motel, a dump with a swimming pool without water that encourages Star to observe: “I like how the stains everywhere look like drawings!” But the manager of the luxury seaside resort, played by that formidable card Michael Hitchcock, finds space for them, so they are soon free to perform amidst the hedonism of middle-aged vacation that is unbalanced Florida.
To meet the action, there is – wait – a science fiction supervillain, played, incognito, by Kristen Wiig. Her name is Sharon Gordon Fisherman, and she is a punk kabuki demon with jet black fringe, powder white skin and albino eyebrows and eyelashes; Wiig’s potent operatic performance suggests Faye Dunaway playing Klaus Nomi. The character has a plan to launch a swarm of killer mosquitoes in Vista Del Mar (the city that avoided it because it was a freak when she grew up there). But the real purpose of this demented plot is to plant his sexy right arm, Edgar (Jamie Dornan), in the hotel, where he stays with our heroines.
This happens at the bar, under the influence of an aquarium-sized cocktail (and a dance floor scene with a pulsating disco version of “My Heart Will Go On”), which leads to a very funny joke from Barb, Star and Edgar waking up in bed the next morning with a vertically stacked sandwich. It is even funnier when the two women discuss what happened, and in their monotonous way of being an insurer, they are completely prosaic in remembering all sexual gymnastic positions. That sounds like a cheap joke, but in this case it really fills Barb and Star. They’re American drones, sure, but they’re erotically wide awake. And the mutual search for Edgar’s attention will separate them.
“Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar” is not “Bridesmaids”. This movie was five times funnier and five times deeper. This one, with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay as two of its producers, has that vibe “Relax, it’s just a foamy cartoon”, with the director, Josh Greenbaum, telling the jokes together. The film features absurdities known as a suicidal crab with the voice of Morgan Freeman, Jamie Dornan bouncing on the beach in a broken-hearted ballad and Damon Wayans Jr. as a top-secret operator who compulsively reveals all secrets. For all these reasons, there is a sneaky suggestion of daily obsession in the two main performances. Mumolo plays Barb with exquisite plastic manners and a storm that slowly forms below them that resembles Andrea Martin in his most inspired form, and Wiig makes Star a flower geek. The film may be an extended sketch, but these two sketch it with a spicy spirit.