Bachelorette: Something Borrowed, Something New

A top notch Kirsten Dunst leads the pack of bridesmaids behaving badly in this gleeful but uneven female take on 'The Hangover'

By Mary Pols | | September 6, 2012 |

Movieweb

Bachelorette

Year: 2012

Director: Leslye Headland

Studio: The Weinstein Company

Actors: Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, Lizzy Caplan

Bachelorette is about three friends(Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan and Isla Fisher) who reunite forthe wedding of the overweight girl they deigned to hang out with in high school. They are superficial, bigoted and cruel. Thats not a complaint; half the fun of Bachelorette is seeing just how awful this trio can be to each other, innocent bystanders and even inanimate objects. (After the bachelorette party, two of them, at least one high on cocaine, squeeze into the fat girls wedding dress and accidentally tear it in half.) But it does place limits on what Bachelorette writer/director Leslye Headland, making her splashy feature film debut, can do with the third act in terms of remaining true to the tone she has set and to her gleefully nasty mean girl characters.

The groups Queen Bee is named Reganmy fervent hope is this was Headlands nod to The Exorcistand played by Dunst, who glides effortlessly through the movie as if she were born to the genre of ribald comedies. Regan is, to put it mildly, terrifying. The groomsmen try to explain to the horny best man (James Marsden) why he should proceed with caution vis-a-vis the maid of honor: You know how there are serial killers and th! en there is Hannibal Lector? Well there are girls and then there is Regan. Regan has a med school student boyfriend in Philadelphia and a vague job counseling preteen cancer patients that she appears to have taken simply so she can tell people about her alleged good works. It baffles and enrages her that the bride Becky (the gloriously funny Rebel Wilson) is beating her to the altar. Ive done everything right, she fumes to the rest of the trio.

(READ: About Bachelorettes wildly successful pre-release strategy)

Shes certainly done more right than they have: Gena (Caplan, whose lively eyes and throaty voice remind me of a young Debra Winger), flies in from Los Angeles for the wedding, having toted a baby powder container full of coke past the TSA. Shes unemployed and nervous about seeing her ex from high school, Clyde (Adam Scott), who is also a groomsman. Airhead Katie (the droll Isla Fisher), who flits in from her retail job at a nearby Club Monaco, is an outwardly sunny sort who dabbles in suicide attempts. But Headland gives Regan a bleak backstory as well; shes an unreformed and highly expert bulimic. The movie is filled with well-paced physical comedy, but the bitter tidbit that stuck with me was Regan making a tonsil pistol out of her index and middle fingers, running them under the tap (how hygienic!) and then inserting. Bachelorette taught me more about bulimia methods than four years at Duke in the 1980s.

(READ: Richard Corliss on Dunst at Cannes and Melancholia)

In terms of the big picture, Bachelorette is, as was Bridesmaids (which it will be compared to endlessly), thematically centered on immaturity. But within that scope, it is less mature. Its bold, lively and filled with knowing ! pop cultu! re references (the classic Brian Krakow vs. Jordan Catalano debate from My So-Called Life serves as the basis for romantic advice) but still seems not entirely formed. In large part thats due to what Headland does with that pesky final act. Instead of unrepentantly sticking to her mean girlguns, she mostly makes nice. As the enticingly malicious froth she has built up deflates, so does the movie.Apparently Bachelorette has been divisive, with audiences either falling hard for it or walking away disgusted. Id have fallen harder for it if Id walked away more disgusted.

But Im a Party Down devotee, which means Id be happy to see anything that features, as the cancelled Starz ensemble comedy did, Caplan and Scott as sparring love interests. (The Starz show only ran for two short seasons, lamentably, but in those 20 episodes I found Caplan and Scott about as adorable as two people can be.) Gena and Clydes narrative arc, involving an incident in which he let her down in high school and thus spurred her wasted young adulthood, feels cheap and emotionally suspect. If it werent for Caplan and Scotts chemistry none of it would work. Their backstory echoes a similar plot point to the one in Young Adult, which suggested that the trauma of a very youthful pregnancy lost to miscarriage was what made Charlize Therons character such a raging lunatic.Both movies have an undertone of conservatism in regard to young women and pregnancy, intriguing (and odd) since they are embedded in depictions of outrageous behavior typically viewed as loose (drinking, drugs, sex with whomever). Weve come a long way baby, but not that far.

(SEE: Where Dunst landed on TIMEs Top 10 Vampire List)

The best reason to see Bachelorette is Dunst, once a child star (Interview with the Vampire) with an uncanny ability to project maturity, now an ac! tress wit! h an ever-increasing range.In 2010 she was touching as a sunshine girl turned victim of domestic violence in the underrated All Good Things. Last year she had the key role in the acclaimed but not-exactly-multiplex-material Melancholia as the prescient depressive Justine. Shes done comedy before (Dick, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People) but it hasnt been her specialty.Here shes funny in a wonderfully old-fashioned way; you can imagine her teasing the hell out of Cary Grant. Regan is not just a stone cold fox (in the elegant white dress she wears for most of the movie shed make Hitchcock swoon), shes actually stone cold. Chinatown! she snaps at the hapless Asian wedding party planner before dressing her down for some minor canap infraction. Regan learns a little and softens a smidge in the course of Bachelorette, but Dunst brings an edge even to that. I bet Bette Davis would love this Jezebel; I know I did.

READ: About one of Dunsts most daring roles as a teenager