On Saturday Night Live, sketch characters arrive, connect with the audience (or not) and occasionally reach persistent peaks in popularity, becoming giggly rioters and old friends. For a while, starting in the 1990s, the highest honor you could give an “SNL” character was that he or she got their own spin-off movie. That era was fading (in 2010, “MacGruber” hit a stake through his heart), but that was probably a good thing, considering most of those movies were notoriously lukewarm, a hit and miss affair.
However, now you see original comedies that could, in spirit at least, be “SNL” sketch spin-offs. “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 isn’t bad. Since Barb and Star, some ridiculously fuddy-duddy fortieth best friends from Soft Rock, Nebraska, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo don’t wear out their welcome, and the movie, though chuckles more than belly laughs, doesn’t feel filled up. It’s the clever and daffy absurd spin-off that these characters couldn’t-but-could-deserve sketch comedy, and it, in its modestly clever and distracting way, feels just right.
Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) are two enthusiastic Midwestern Rubes who work at Jennifer Convertibles – which isn’t funny, but the funny thing is they think it’s an exciting job. They treat the place like their second home, and I mean that literally. They have coffee talks on the display bench; they will drop in during Thanksgiving to host a holiday dinner. At first they look like twins, or variations on the same person, dressed in cardigans with matching flowery shirts, their hair self-curled into frizzy unofficial poufs reminiscent of the Jane Fonda from ‘Nine to Five’ or Marcia Wallace on ‘The Bob Newhart Show . “
They are like chatter queens of coffee klatsch, their conversation a splashing attack of maniacally cheerful and almost paralyzing banality. They will say things like “To 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 showed a happy face all over, with their overgrown student council fortifications. They are prim and careful, they have never had an unconventional thought, and it is mild that they are the essence of a certain goody-two-shoes Central American normality-as-weirdness. They make Romy and Michelle look like hipsters. They may be the most damn team of cocky optimists since SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie.
So why don’t they sell their welcome in five minutes? Because Wiig and Mumolo, who are working together as screenwriters for the first time since the great ‘Bridesmaids’ (2011), have put just enough of a vision of life in the margins of these two women who find Mr. Peanut sexy and pronounced Don Cheadle as “Chee-adle who treat an evening in a bar as a walk on the wild side, and who regard wearing culottes as close to godliness. (This film does for culottes what “Wayne’s World” did for Queen.) Much of the male screen comedy is built around spectacularly overly screwed up losers. Barb and Star are extraordinarily posh, perky, homely losers. There is a hidden humanity in their ridiculousness.
They learn early on that the furniture store they work for is closing, leaving them jobless – and, in a funny way, without identity. As Barb sums up their predicament: “We’ll find another job. This city is full of places that women in their 40s want to hire! “Barb is a widow, Star is divorced and hasn’t had a date since; they haven’t even left town. So when a friend back from vacation tells her about a little oasis of white sand on the river bank. Florida coast, called Vista Del Mar, they decide to take a week away from it. How well-informed are they about the roads of the new world? Neither of them have a cell phone, and for the trip, Barb grabs traveler’s checks. , left over from my wedding ‘in.
When they arrive at the Palm Vista Hotel and are greeted by a musical production crowd that feels like the pinnacle of their lives, they are sure to have landed in paradise. As it turns out, they should actually be in the Palm Vista Motel, a garbage dump with a waterless pool urging Star to observe: “I like how the stains look like designs all over!” But the luxury beach resort manager, played by that formidable card Michael Hitchcock, takes place for them, so that soon they’ll be free to make a spectacle of themselves amid the hedonism of the spring break-for-middle-agers that Florida is. on the loose.
To get in on the action, there’s – wait for it – a sci-fi supervillain played incognito by Kristen Wiig. Her name is Sharon Gordon Fisherman, and she’s a punk kabuki demon with jet-black dagger bangs, powder-white skin, and albino eyebrows and lashes; Wiig’s powerful opera performance suggests that Faye Dunaway plays Klaus Nomi. The character has a plan to destroy a swarm of deadly mosquitoes on Vista Del Mar (the city that avoided her because she was a freak growing up there). But the real point of this insane plot is to plant her sexy right-hand man, Edgar (Jamie Dornan), in the hotel, where he connects with our heroines.
This happens at the bar, influenced by a fishbowl-sized cocktail (and a scene on the dance floor to a throbbing disco version of ‘My Heart Will Go On’), all leading to the very funny punch line of Barb, Star and Edgar wake up in bed the next morning in a vertically stacked sandwich. It’s even funnier when the two women discuss what happened, and in their ho-hum insurance agency fashion, they’re completely sober about remembering every gymnastic sex position. That sounds like a cheap joke, but in this case it actually fills out Barb and Star. They are indeed American drones, but they are erotically wide awake. And their mutual search for Edgar’s attention will tear them apart.
“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” is not “Bridesmaids.” That movie was five times funnier and five times deeper. This one, with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay as two of the producers, has that “Relax, it’s just a frothy cartoon” vibe, with the director, Josh Greenbaum, carrying the jokes. The film features such well-known absurdities as a suicidal crab voiced by Morgan Freeman, heart-broken Jamie Dornan on the beach in a power ballad, and Damon Wayans Jr. as a top secret operator who compulsively reveals every secret. Nonetheless, there is a sneaky hint of everyday obsession with the two main performances. Mumolo plays Barb with exquisite plastic manners and a slow-growing storm among them reminiscent of Andrea Martin at her most inspired, and Wiig turns Star into a nerd in bloom. The film may be an elaborate sketch, but these two sketch it with a defiant mind.