Two new movies show just how much Hollywood struggles to figure out what to do with funny women.
The Other Woman
Barry Wetcher/Twentieth Century Fox
When Paul Feig and Kristen Wiig's terrific Bridesmaids became a box office hit in 2011 — and it was a monster-sized one, the highest grossing female comedy of all time — basic Hollywood practice should have dictated that in the next year or two, we'd see a slew of clones attempting to capitalize on the same magic. But those raunchy chick-centric movies never materialized. Feig followed up his success by directing the similarly raucous buddy cop film The Heat with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in 2013, and in between, there were the milder, musicals Joyful Noise and Pitch Perfect. Still, pickings remain slim.
Maybe the problem is that the industry tends to think that a movie can't just be about women — it has to be about girl power, projecting a canned message of empowerment even if it leaves its characters dangling in the wind or humiliates them for laughs. That's definitely the case for Walk of Shame, which hit theaters this weekend, and The Other Woman, which opened last week. These are comedies that trumpet being yourself and female bonding, while spending most of their actual runtime having their heroines called whores or only ever talking about men. One of the things that made Bridesmaids work so well is that its characters had personalities, histories, hopes, and insecurities. Walk of Shame and The Other Woman have types — good girl and bad girl, dumb and sexy, or successful and controlling.
Walk of Shame
Jaimie Trueblood/Focus World
The Other Woman made nearly $25 million in its first weekend, besting Captain America: The Winter Soldier for the top spot at the box office — great if unnecessary proof that there's an underserved audience eager to watch comedies about women like this. But it's a clumsily made, weirdly paced, brainless revenge film that squanders its awesomely game-leading actresses. High-powered lawyer Carly (Cameron Diaz) discovers her new dream guy Mark King (played by Jaime Lannister himself, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is actually married to ditzy housewife Kate (Leslie Mann), and eventually, they find out he also has another mistress, Amber (Kate Upton). But rather than fight with each other, they bond to inflict summer camp-worthy pranks (including putting laxatives in his drink) on Mark before upping the stakes to financial ruin.
Among the The Other Woman's offenses are that its bits of physical comedy are allowed to drag on until everything funny about them has been drained away, that the actual revenge process doesn't even get going until the final third of the film, that it has a joke about how icky transwomen are, and that it contains Nicki Minaj's acting debut but confines her to a few thankless scenes of being a sounding board for her boss, Carly.
But what's really maddening about The Other Woman is that it's a film about female friendship that, as NPR's Linda Holmes astutely pointed out, fails to pass the Bechdel test. All scenes in which Carly, Kate, and, eventually, Amber might be talking about something other than Mark are consigned to one of the many wordless montages. It's as if the film, which was written by Melissa Stack and directed by Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook), either doesn't care or just has no idea what the characters would otherwise say to one another, substituting instead shots of laughing set to songs like "Girls Just Want To Have Fun." (Seriously.)
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