Bridesmaids is a 2011 American comedy film directed by Paul Feig from a screenplay by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig, and produced by Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel and Clayton Townsend. It stars Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy, and Chris O'Dowd.[6] The film focuses on a woman who experiences a series of misfortunes after being asked to serve as maid of honor for her best friend.
Actresses Mumolo and Wiig wrote the screenplay after the latter was cast in Apatow's comedy Knocked Up (2007), and budgeted at $32.5 million. Upon its opening release in the United States on May 13, 2011, Bridesmaids was a critical and commercial success. The film made $26 million in its opening weekend, eventually earning over $306 million worldwide, and surpassed Knocked Up to become the top-grossing Apatow production to date,[7] and served as a touchstone for discussion about women in comedy.[8][9][10] It has since been cited as among the best comedy films of the 21st century.[11][12][13]
Annie Walker is a failed woman. Her bakery failed due to the recession, wiping out her savings and causing her boyfriend to leave her. Having lost her passion for baking, Annie works a stressful, underpaid job at a jewelry store and shares an apartment with obnoxious British immigrant siblings Gil and Brynn. She has an unfulfilling, casual sexual relationship with the wealthy and self-absorbed Ted, who treats her like an object. The only positive presence in Annie's life is her lifelong best friend, Lillian.
When Lillian becomes engaged to her boyfriend Doug, she asks Annie to be her maid of honor. At the engagement party, she meets Lillian's bridesmaids: Rita, Lillian's long married and cynical cousin; Becca, Lillian's nave newlywed coworker; Megan, Doug's raunchy and foul-mouthed but friendly sister; and Helen, the wealthy and snobby trophy wife of Doug's boss. Annie and Helen are instantly jealous of each other's friendship with Lillian and become increasingly competitive for her attention.
Annie's suggestion for a bachelorette party at Lillian's parents' lake house is overruled in favor of a Las Vegas trip planned by Helen. Unable to afford a first-class ticket and too proud to allow Helen to pay, Annie books a ticket in economy class. Annie accepts a sedative and liquor from Helen to calm her massive fear of flying and begins to hallucinate, suffering a paranoid breakdown that culminates in her being apprehended by a U.S. Air Marshal. The plane makes an emergency landing, and the party takes a bus back home. Annie apologizes, but Lillian decides it's best if Helen takes over planning the bridal shower and wedding.
Meanwhile, Annie grows closer to Nathan Rhodes, an Irish-American Wisconsin State Patrol Trooper who let her off without a ticket for broken brake lights. A former regular customer at Annie's bakery, he repeatedly encourages her to open a new one, though she is resistant to the idea. After a romantic night together, she panics and abruptly leaves when Nathan surprises her with baking supplies.
Annie is fired from the jewelry store after a profane argument with a teenage customer, and is later evicted by her roommates, forcing her to move in with her mother. She travels to Helen's home in Chicago for the extravagant bridal shower, which is Parisian-themed - an idea of Annie's that Helen had previously rejected. When Helen upstages Annie's heartfelt gift by surprising Lillian with a trip to Paris, Annie flies into a rage, berating Helen and Lilian in front of everyone and destroying the decor. Lillian kicks her out of the shower and disinvites her from the wedding.
As Annie is driving home, her still-broken taillights result in a car accident, from which the other driver flees. Nathan is the responding officer, and he admonishes her for blowing him off, not fixing her taillights, and not taking responsibility for her life. Ted arrives shortly after to give Annie a ride, causing Nathan to storm off in disgust. However, when Ted asks Annie to perform oral sex on him as he drives, she demands to be let out of the car and walks home, leaving him for good.
Megan visits the recently reclusive Annie, which motivates her to take control of her life. She resumes baking, gets her car fixed, and tries to make amends with Nathan, who ignores her. On the day of the wedding, Helen appears at Annie's begging for help finding Lillian, who has disappeared.
Helen apologizes to Annie, tearfully revealing that while sought after for her event planning skills, she does not have any true friends and feels lonely in her marriage. With some begrudging help from Nathan, they find Lillian hiding out in her own apartment, having become overwhelmed by Helen's extravagant wedding planning and fear of leaving her life in Milwaukee. Annie reconciles with Lillian and resumes her role as maid of honor.
After the wedding, Annie and Helen finally become friends. She also reconciles with Nathan, who arrives unexpectedly to pick her up after the wedding (possibly arranged by Helen). Annie and Nathan kiss, then ride away in his police car.
Major uncredited appearances include: Jon Hamm as Ted, Annie's sex buddy;[15] Grammy Award-winning accordionist, pianist, and composer Nick Ariondo as the accordion player;[16] and Emmy, Drama Desk and Grammy Award winner Pat Carroll as the old woman in the car.[17]
The film's co-writers, Wiig and Annie Mumolo, appear together when Mumolo plays the credited role of Nervous Woman on Plane,[18] while the film's director, Paul Feig, appears uncredited as one of the wedding guests.
Mia Rose Frampton appears briefly as a thirteen-year-old girl who argues with Annie in the jewelry store; the film's Blu-ray release includes an extended, ten minute scene of improvised dialogue between the two. [20]
It was only after the movie was completed that anyone said this had any significance. We didn't think it was any different than something like The House Bunny or Baby Mama. So we didn't think we were breaking any new ground. We just thought it was a fun thing to do.
Several actresses auditioned for the role of Megan, including Rebel Wilson and Busy Philipps, the latter of whom had worked with Apatow and Feig on their comedy-drama television series Freaks and Geeks.[24] Wilson, who improvised for Apatow and Feig for an hour during her audition, impressed them so much that she was later cast in the smaller role of Brynn. It marked her first appearance in an American production,[25] and she allegedly received $3,500, all of which went toward paying fees to join the Screen Actors Guild.[26] Mindy Kaling read for the role of Lillian, eventually losing to Wiig's Saturday Night Live colleague Maya Rudolph.[27] Rose Byrne initially also auditioned for Lillian, but later took the opportunity to read Helen.[28] Byrne was eventually chosen as the nemesis because she wasn't a comedian as Feig feared the character would be "coming out to be too arch if we had a funny woman doing it."[29] Greta Gerwig and Judy Greer also auditioned for unspecific roles.[30][31]
Bridesmaids was budgeted at $32.5 million.[32] Though primarily set in Milwaukee and Chicago, principal photography actually took place in Los Angeles, California.[33] Production designer Jefferson Sage, who has worked with Apatow and Paul Feig since their Freaks and Geeks days, noted that the first fact that appealed to him about the project "was that you had these two disparate worlds: There was Annie's world in Milwaukee, and then there was Helen's world in Chicago. It immediately drew this dichotomy between the rivalry that developed between them."[33] However, Sage acknowledged that it was a challenge to find "architecture that would give us those Midwestern worlds. Chicago is a beautiful, distinctive city architecturally, and restricted views of downtown L.A. feel like Chicago."[33] The production decided to use the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden as the location for Lillian and Dougie's wedding.[33] Additional scenes where Annie meets Officer Rhodes on the highways between Milwaukee and Chicago were filmed in Oxnard, California, which Sage described as a "broad, flat, green area away from mountains."[33]
Bridesmaids received positive reviews upon its release, with praise towards Wiig and Mumolo's screenplay and also McCarthy's performance. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 89% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 294 reviews, with an average score of 7.50/10. The site's critical consensus states: "A marriage of genuine characters, gross out gags, and pathos, Bridesmaids is a female-driven comedy that refuses to be boxed in as Kristen Wiig emerges as a real star."[8] Metacritic gives the film a score of 75 out of 100 based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[34] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[35]
Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars of out 4, and said that Bridesmaids "seems to be a more or less deliberate attempt to cross the Chick Flick with the Raunch Comedy. It definitely proves that women are the equal of men in vulgarity, sexual frankness, lust, vulnerability, overdrinking and insecurity ... Love him or not, Judd Apatow is consistently involved with movies that connect with audiences."[36]
Tamara Winfrey-Harris noted in Ms. that, to her "enduring surprise", despite the involvement of Apatow, and themes that had been "done and done and done", the film passed the Bechdel test of female-driven storylines.[37]
Critic Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly pointed out the significance of Bridesmaids' success as follows: "So far, the message that Hollywood seems to have taken from the incredible success of Bridesmaids is a predictably reductive one, something along the lines of: Hey, look! Raunchy comedies for women with awesome grossout scenes in the middle of them can be big box office too!! The message that Hollywood should be taking is: A comedy that's raunchy and fearless, and also brilliantly written and shrewdly honest about what's really going on in women's lives, may actually connect with the fabled non-teenage audience (remember them?)."[38]
795a8134c1