Bridesmaids opens with Annie Walker in a Milwaukee apartment she can barely stand, sharing space with roommates she can barely tolerate, sleeping with a man who treats her like an appointment. Her bakery, Cake Baby, died in the Great Recession. She sells jewelry she can’t afford to a thirteen-year-old who argues with her. Then her oldest friend gets engaged, and Annie gets a job she cannot pay for.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Kristen Wiig Plays Annie Walker
Paul Feig directed Bridesmaids from a screenplay by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. Wiig stars as Annie, a single, underachieving woman whose life has come apart. Maya Rudolph plays Lillian, the lifelong best friend whose engagement hands Annie the title of maid of honor and a bill she has no way to cover.
This is the engine of the film. Annie is lovelorn and broke, and she bluffs her way through the expensive and bizarre rituals anyway. The tagline says it plainly: “Save the date.” One chance to get it perfect.
The bridesmaids arrive at the engagement party as a set of types that the film then refuses to leave alone. Wendi McLendon-Covey is Rita, Lillian’s cousin. Ellie Kemper is Becca, Lillian’s coworker. Melissa McCarthy is Megan, Doug’s sister. Rose Byrne is Helen, the wife of Doug’s boss, and the film’s real antagonist.
Helen and the Rivalry That Drives the Film
Annie and Helen are jealous of each other’s friendship with Lillian. They compete for her attention, and the competition is the spine of the movie. Feig cast Byrne against type on purpose. He feared the character would come out “too arch if we had a funny woman doing it,” so he chose a dramatic actress instead of a comedian.
That choice is the smartest thing in Bridesmaids. Byrne plays Helen as polished and quietly desperate, and the film never lets her off as a simple villain. She is richer, more put-together and just as needy as Annie. The rivalry reads as two people who both know Lillian is the best thing in their lives.
Chris O’Dowd plays Officer Nathan Rhodes, who pulls Annie over after the engagement party for erratic driving. She passes a sobriety test. He writes her a ticket for broken brake lights, then recognizes her as the owner of Cake Baby and agrees to rescind it if she fixes the taillights. It is a small scene and one of the film’s best.
The Brazilian Restaurant and the Dress Boutique
Annie picks a Brazilian restaurant for lunch with the bridesmaids, then takes them to a high-end bridal-dress boutique. Everyone but Helen ate the meat. The food poisoning that follows is the film’s most famous sequence, and it earns the reputation.
Rita vomits into a toilet at the boutique. Becca vomits on Rita. Megan defecates into the bathroom sink. Lillian, wearing an haute couture wedding dress, tries to rush through traffic to reach another bathroom and succumbs to diarrhea. It is gross, it is sustained, and it is built entirely on character. Each woman’s reaction is hers alone.
A Cast With More Than One Register
The film’s supporting bench is deep. Jon Hamm plays Ted, Annie’s sex buddy, uncredited. Rebel Wilson plays Brynn. Matt Lucas plays Gil. Jill Clayburgh plays Annie’s mom. Terry Crews plays a boot camp instructor. Michael Hitchcock plays Don Cholodecki. Wilson Phillips appear as themselves late in the film and perform “Hold On.”
Wilson auditioned for Megan and improvised for an hour for Judd Apatow and Feig. She impressed them enough to land the smaller role of Brynn, her first appearance in an American production. She allegedly received $3,500, all of it going to Screen Actors Guild fees. Mindy Kaling read for Lillian and lost to Rudolph. Byrne first auditioned for Lillian before reading Helen. Greta Gerwig and Judy Greer also auditioned.
What Bridesmaids Cost and What It Earned
- Budget: $32.5 million
- Worldwide gross: $306.5 million
- Runtime: 125 minutes
- Release date: May 13, 2011, by Universal Pictures
- Premiere: April 28, 2011, in Westwood, Los Angeles
- Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actress (McCarthy), Best Original Screenplay (Wiig and Mumolo)
Bridesmaids surpassed Knocked Up to become the top-grossing Apatow Productions film to date. It was shot primarily in Los Angeles, standing in for Milwaukee and Chicago, though the film is set in both cities. Production designer Jefferson Sage said the first thing that appealed to him was “these two disparate worlds”: Annie’s Milwaukee and Helen’s Chicago, and the rivalry between them.
The Verdict on Bridesmaids
The film has served as a touchstone for discussion about women in comedy, and several publications have ranked it among the best comedy films of the 21st century. That reputation is deserved but slightly off-center. The food-poisoning scene is what people remember. What holds the film together is Annie’s humiliation, which the script never treats as a joke to be laughed at from a distance.
Bridesmaids runs 125 minutes and does not waste them. Wiig and Mumolo wrote a comedy where the set pieces are loud and the emotional stakes are quiet, and Feig keeps both running at once. The Academy nominated McCarthy and the screenwriters, and both nods were right. This is a film that changed what a studio comedy about women could be, and it did it by being funny first.
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