Movie Review: Bachelorette

Directed by: Leslye Headland

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, Isla Fisher, and Rebel Wilson

Plot: Three cynical high school friends team up as bridesmaids for a girl they used to keep around as their own personal punching bag.

Review: 

The story centers on three friends from high school: Regan, Gena, and Katie. Regan (Kirsten Dunst) is a borderline OCD-case and control freak. In high school, she was queen bitch of the school. Seriously, her and her friends called each other The Bitches and affectionately refer to each other as “B” for short. Gena (Lizzy Caplan) sounded like she was happy in high school despite some passionate anti-establishment rebellion until one well-place break up sent her down a spiral of self-destruction.  Katie (Isla Fisher) is a ditzy red-head who has a smaller attention span than a squirrel. They are invited to be bridesmaid for their friend Becky (Rebel Wilson), who they used to refer to as “Pig Face” behind her back. It becomes very clear right away that these girls kept Becky around to make themselves look and feel better than they were. These characters are very pathetic, and the idea that we are going to be hanging out with them for the next feature length time is not looking good. This fact has always remained with female character behaving badly as opposed to men. They always come off as genuinely awful people, and if it was any other filmmaker or actresses, these girls would probably be exactly that. What we eventually get is the kind of lovable assholes that Bill Murray and Vince Vaughn excel at. Now, they are collected once again to watch Becky walk down the aisle for a husband who is good looking, successful, and genuinely in love with her, and they simply cannot stand it.

The only way for them to get over this idea is to be the best friends they possibly can be, or at least by their own messed up standards. Regan starts running herself ragged trying to make sure that there isn’t a strand out of place from the rehearsal dinner to the big night. The stress that she throws on herself is some kind of punishment, the same kind that she used to inflict on herself when he was bulimic. Meanwhile, Gena and Katie are trying to throw a rager of a bachelorette party which doesn’t really end the way that they like. When the girls are left alone, it is like they are oil in a world of water. They just cause chaos everywhere they go.  After a mishap with the wedding gown, they start to run all over the city trying to fix the damn thing while getting into all sorts of trouble along the way. Regan starts flirting with one the groomsmen just for the attention and the prospect of finally relaxing after all this planning. Katie starts taking every drug and drink she can get her hands on while another groomsmen who has had a crush on her since high school follows her around like a sad puppy dog. As that puppy dog, Kyle Bornheimer is actually very charismatic in a lovable idiot kind of way. You can’t help but root for him even though it is more fun watching him stumble through social situations. It is just kind of hard to see behind Fisher’s ditz persona since she goes for broke.

Gena has the most complicated night of them all. Her ex-boyfriend, the one from high school that ruined her self-worth, is one of the groomsmen, Clyde. Clyde is played to perfection by Adam Scott. He has the shit-eating grin look to him so you kind of suspect him of being a jerk right from the get-go. He is a great foil to the ever sarcastic Caplan who talks circles around everyone she bumps into. Their relationship is far more complicated than they want to admit. Gena and Clyde were torn apart by some of the worst hypotheticals that young lovers could have to deal with. It caused the kind of irreparable damage that kept them from committing to a healthy relationship ever since. In one of the best scenes of the movie, they put everything on front street.

It is this kind of sincerity and sentimentality that hold the movie together. It could have gone for a balls-out raunch fest, but instead it has that Apatow-esque ability to find the humor in some of the sadder moments of life we all share. This is made even better by their ability to pace it out over the course of the movie instead of leading up to over-sentimentality in its final moments like so many comedies tend to do. Unfortunately, it is also not very original nor does it ever prove to be a laugh riot. It is just a consistently entertaining flick.

Rating: 7/10