On ‘Saturday Night Live’, sketch characters arrive, make contact with the audience (or not) and occasionally hit sustained peaks of popularity, becoming a lagro essay and old friends. For a while, from the nineties onwards, the highest honor you could give an “SNL” character was that he or she got their own spin-off movie. That era faded (in 2010, ‘MacGruber’ drove a stock through his heart), but that was probably a good thing, as most of the films were notorious for a loud, striking case.
Now, however, you see original comedies that could, at least in spirit, be ‘SNL’ sketch eliminations. “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” was one. ‘Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar’ is another thing. Just this one is not bad. Like Barb and Star, some ridiculously fuddy-duddy-forty-something best friends from Soft Rock, Nebraska, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, do not carry out their welcome, and the film, although it laughs more than belly laughs, feel stuffed. It’s the bright and dull absurdist spin-off that these not-but-could-sketch comedy characters deserve, and it feels just right in its modestly clever and distracting way.
Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) are enthusiastic two Midwestern rubes working at Jennifer Convertibles – which is not funny, but what’s funny is that they find an exciting job. They treat the place as their second home, and I mean it literally. They keep coffee on the display bench; they will drop by during Thanksgiving to host a holiday dinner. At first they look like twins, or variations on the same person, dressed in stockings with matching floral shirts, their hair curled at home in frizzy pussies like the Jane Fonda from “Nine to Five” or Marcia Wallace on “The Bob Newhart Show.”
They are like chat queens of the coffee gossip, their conversation is a shocking onslaught of manly cheerfulness and almost paralyzing banality. They will say things like “To me, a woman named Trish is a woman you can rely on!” or “The air smells different here!” “You’re right! It smells like Red Lobster!” And they put a happy face on everything, with their overgrown student council increase. They’s fine and careful, they’ve never had an unconventional thought, and it’s so soft that it’s the core of a certain good-two-shoes Central American normality-as-strangeness. They make Romy and Michelle look like hipsters. They are perhaps the most insane team of cockeyed optimists since SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie.
Why then do they not carry out their welcome within five minutes? Because Wiig and Mumolo, who are collaborating as screenwriters for the first time since the big “Bridesmaids” (2011), have just pushed a vision of life into the margins of these two women who think that Mr. Peanut is sexy and Don Cheadle pronounced ‘Chee-adle’, who treats an evening at a bar as a walk on the wild side, and who considers wearing culottes divine. (This film plays a role in the sense that ‘Wayne’s World’ did for Queen.) A large number of male screen comedies are built around spectacular losers. Barb and Star are outrageously gentle, perky, homemade losers. There is a closet of humanity to their ridiculousness.
Early on, they learn that the furniture outlet they work for is closing, without a job – and in a funny way without an identity. While Barb sums up their plight: ‘We’ll get another job. This town is full of places that women in their 40s want to rent! ‘Barb is a widow, Star is divorced, and since then there has been no date; they did not even leave the city. When they are told by a friend about her vacation, from a small white-sand oasis on the coast of Florida called Vista Del Mar, they decide to take a week’s getaway there. How captured are they on the paths of the new world? None of them have cell phones, and Barb packs ‘checks left over from my wedding’ for the trip.
When they arrive at the Palm Vista Hotel and are greeted by a musical production number that feels like the highlight of their lives, they are sure to have ended up in paradise. It turns out they should actually be at the Palm Vista Motel, a landfill with a waterless pool that urges Star to take note: ‘I love how the stains look designed everywhere!’ But the manager of the luxury resort on the beach, played by the undoubted card Michael Hitchcock, finds space for them, so they will soon be free to make themselves glasses amidst the jump-by-middle-agers hedonism in Florida disconnects.
To sum up the action, there is – wait for it – a scientific supervillain, played, incognito, by Kristen Wiig. Her name is Sharon Gordon Fisherman, and she’s a punk kabuki demon with jet black dagger, powder white skin and albino eyebrows and eyelashes; Wiig’s powerful operational execution suggests that Faye Dunaway play Klaus Nomi. The character has a plan to sic a swarm of killer mosquitoes on Vista Del Mar (the city that avoided her because she was a freak when she grew up there). But the real point of this demented plot is to plant her sexy right hand man, Edgar (Jamie Dornan), in the hotel, where he joins our heroines.
It happens at the bar under the influence of a cocktail as big as a fishbowl (and a dance floor scene set to a throbbing disco version of ‘My Heart Will Go On’), all leading to the very funny punchline of Barb, Star and Edgar wakes up in bed the next morning in a vertical sandwich. It’s even funnier when the two women discuss what happened, and at their ho-hum insurance office, they are totally matter-of-fact to recall every gymnastic sex position. It sounds like a cheap joke, but in this case it fills in Barb and Star. These are American drones, right, but they are erotically wide awake. And their mutual search for Edgar’s attention is going to divide them.
‘Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar’ is not ‘Bridesmaids’. That movie was five times funnier and five times deeper. This one, with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay as two of its producers, had the “Relax, it’s just a frothy cartoon” sphere, with director Josh Greenbaum dragging the jokes along. The film features characteristics of absurdities like a suicide crab with the voice of Morgan Freeman, Jamie Dornan helping on a beach in a broken heart ballad, and Damon Wayans Jr. as a top secret operator that compulsively reveals every secret. For all this, there is a sneaky hint of the everyday obsession with the two main performances. Mumolo plays Barb with superb plastic manners and a slow storm among them that reminds Andrea Martin of her most inspired way, and Wiig makes Star a geek in bloom. The film may be an extensive sketch, but these two sketch it with a gravy spirit.