It’s apt that Melissa McCarthy’s new comedy, “Life of the Party,” opened Thursday night, on Fred Astaire’s birthday, because McCarthy has the Fred Astaire problem, a virtuoso’s self-inflicted dilemma born of power and prominence. Astaire famously said, “Either the camera will dance, or I will”; at the height of his fame, he was given control of the direction of his dances and exercised that power in a way that, he believed, optimally showcased his artistry rather than that of the director. The result was that, despite Astaire’s great dancing, those scenes (enjoying a grotesquely inflated reputation) are, for the most part, boring, and the films that go with them aren’t any better. McCarthy, similarly, is her own producer, and in “Life of the Party”—as in “The Boss” and “Tammy”—she has chosen to work with the director Ben Falcone (her husband), whose mild and uninflected work showcases McCarthy with a bland neutrality.
These sentimentalized and bowdlerized comedies stifle McCarthy’s improvisational imagination to the point of unrecognizability; the best material may have been left not even on the cutting-room hard drive but in a temporarily closed door of her comedic mind. The setup of “Life of the Party” is an old one—it was used by Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School” (1986), by Bing Crosby in “High Time” (1960), and by the Marx brothers in “Horse Feathers” (1932). McCarthy (who wrote the story with Falcone) plays Deanna Miles, a fortysomething mother in Georgia, whose husband, Dan (Matt Walsh), declares—moments after they drop off their daughter, Maddie (Molly Gordon), for her senior year at Decatur University—that he is seeing another woman and wants a divorce. (He also, with a calm cruelty, sells their house out from under Deanna, asserting that it’s solely in his name.)
Suddenly, a long-ago life choice surges to the fore: Deanna and Dan met as students at Decatur, but, when Deanna became pregnant with their child, before senior year, she dropped out of school, while Dan completed his degree. Now, financially dependent on her soon-to-be ex and without a career, she decides, on the spur of the moment, to go back to Decatur for her own senior year—and involves herself in Maddie’s social life in the process. Deanna shows up as the embarrassingly uncool rah-rah mom who tries to get down with the lingo. Maddie is unhappy having her around, but Maddie’s friends, who adore Deanna, have no such reservations (and, incidentally, bestow on her a set of nicknames, including Dee Dee, Dee Rock, and Dee Train, that prove crucial to the plot). So, with a preternaturally patient maturity, Maddie takes Deanna under her wing, restyling her for college life.
In the movie’s one moment of surprising candor, Deanna confesses to Maddie and her sorority sisters (who soon induct Deanna as an honorary member) that her life, since college, has been a disaster—though, of course, she quickly backtracks to except Maddie, the joy of her life, from the rubric. But it’s clear that Deanna’s unintended pregnancy, along with her submission and deference to Dan (they had the money for one of them to finish their studies, not both), led to her spending two decades in domesticity when, in fact, she dreamed of a career.
This backstory comes to the fore when Deanna begins a relationship with one of Maddie’s classmates, the tall and well-groomed Jack (Luke Benward). After a one-night stand, they agree to just be friends, but their mutual attraction keeps bursting back into flame, as, most comedically, in a scene in which the two have sex in library stacks. (The actual action is merely suggested.) Given the backstory on which the movie depends, one might expect Deanna to contemplate what she’d do if she got pregnant from her fling with Jack, with whom she envisions no future at all; it would be a natural thing for her to joke about it with her best friend, Christine (Maya Rudolph)—and even to mention abortion. But “Life of the Party” lacks the emotional, let alone the comedic, imagination for any such practicalities. Instead, the movie includes a scene of Deanna and Maddie doing a walk of shame (as Maddie calls it) together back from a frat house, and it’s full of innocuously ribald one-liners, including one about Deanna’s “vagoogle” (ask it anything) and gags about Christine’s hot sex life with her husband, Frank (Damon Jones).
Above all, the movie that “Life of the Party” resembles even more than its collegiate predecessors is the recent prom-com “Blockers,” in which three Illinois parents join forces to crash a senior prom in order to prevent their daughters from keeping a pact to lose their virginity that night. What the films have in common is a view of the parents as a mess and the kids as entirely all right. (Yes, there are two mean girls in “Life of the Party,” but a knock-down-drag-out fight ends quickly and is resolved amicably.) For that matter, Maddie’s equanimity in the face of her parents’ split—rather, in the face of her father’s affair, departure, and financial malice—is almost robotically detached; it’s as if, when Deanna reassures Maddie that the divorce has nothing to do with her, the young woman takes that idea absurdly, placidly literally. In both films, the depiction of utterly benign adolescents and young adults seems less a matter of artistic conception than of marketing: it reassures parental viewers rather than scaring them, and it flatters younger ones rather than satirizing or scrutinizing them. (“Blockers,” with its idiosyncrasies and clever physical comedy, is the far better film.)
The pat drama and the mild conflicts of “Life of the Party” leave McCarthy with little chance to shine, despite her near-constant presence onscreen. She’s at her most vigorous in a scene featuring an eighties-themed bash, where her period styles and moves are a hit. Her best moments, by far, are the occasional offhand dialogue riffs, which drift like trick billiard shots, suddenly accelerating in mid-trajectory and darting obliquely off course before striking their target. These moments decorate the film throughout and hint at the wilder, funnier comedy waiting to break free—both from the setup and from McCarthy herself.
There is one eccentrically imagined character who steals the spotlight from Deanna, and the performer playing the role outshines McCarthy. Among Maddie’s sorority sisters is a woman, Helen, who’s older than the twenty or so others. Helen, as it turns out, spent eight years in a coma, and then went to college, where she enjoys an unusual measure of fame as Coma Girl, a social-media celebrity with three million Twitter followers. The actress who plays Helen, Gillian Jacobs, is among the most inspired actresses of the moment. Her performance in Mike Birbiglia’s comedy about comedy, “Don’t Think Twice,” had a quietly impulsive energy that leaned toward melodrama. In “Life of the Party,” she lends Helen a beatific but distracted gleam that’s as subtly giddy as it is implicitly wounded. She captures more character with a turned-up lip or a raised eyebrow than the rest of the film does with its blatant antics.
McCarthy’s formulaic, sweetened, and diluted films have been making money. With Astaire, it took his slowing down a step, and the diminuendo of his career, for him to put his feet in the care of an imaginatively interventionist director, Stanley Donen; their dancing-camera production numbers in “Royal Wedding” are true collaborations and advances in the art of movie dance and cinema. I wish the singularly gifted McCarthy no such downturn; I hope that she precludes any such misfortune by joining forces with sharper-toned directors who could help to advance her comedy’s wildest and deepest inspirations.
Sourse: newyorker.com
