Premiering less than a year apart in 2011 and 2012, Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids and Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette offer complementary takes on female friendship, toxic insecurity, and finding direction in life, with characters who would probably hate each other in part because they have more in common than they’d like to admit. Bridesmaids was a massive, crowd-pleasing hit, launching major new career phases for Feig, star/co-writer Kristen Wiig, and co-star Melissa McCarthy, while Bachelorette never expanded beyond a limited theatrical release. Still, they’ve remained entwined, part of an anticipated wave of female-driven raunchy comedies that has ebbed and flowed in subsequent years at the whims of the still male-dominated Hollywood establishment.
The characters in these movies wouldn’t want their fates dictated by men, though, and the movies themselves should be afforded the same autonomy. Finding the self-respect to stand on their own is a key element of the protagonists’ journeys in both movies, even if they still eventually end up coupled off with male partners. Those relationships are always secondary to the women’s friendships with each other, which are more complex and more valuable than any romantic connection.
The inciting incident in both movies is the announcement of an engagement and the feigned excitement from a friend who’s about to question all of her life choices. The reaction from Bachelorette’s Regan (Kirsten Dunst) to the news of her longtime friend Becky (Rebel Wilson) getting married is more vicious than that of Bridesmaids’ Annie (Wiig) when she learns that her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is engaged, but both women are immediately sent into crisis mode. Annie endures that crisis essentially alone, while Regan’s first act is to call her friends Gena (Lizzy Caplan) and Katie (Isla Fisher) to trash-talk Becky behind her back.
Right away, Bachelorette seems nastier and more mean-spirited, and Headland makes it clear that these women are probably not good people. Annie is gentler and easier to like, but the emotions driving all of these characters’ behavior are the same, and they all lash out in unhealthy and hurtful ways. In Bridesmaids, that often takes the form of broad, slapstick comedy, but the effect is ultimately the same: Lillian and Becky are both left picking up the pieces of their trainwreck friends when they should be able to focus on their own major life events.
As much as Regan, Gena, and Katie denigrate Becky, she’s the only one who seems to have her life together, with an obviously loving fiancé (Hayes MacArthur) and a positive attitude despite years of insults and harassment. Wilson plays the much goofier role of Annie’s weirdo roommate in Bridesmaids, but in Bachelorette she plays the straight woman to her friends’ degenerate antics. Becky serves as a reminder that maybe at one time this trio did possess genuine solidarity, something they could find again if they could stop projecting their self-loathing even for a second.
The relationship between Lillian and Annie in Bridesmaids is more balanced, even if Annie carries at least as much self-loathing as the three protagonists in Bachelorette. Lillian is extraordinarily patient and understanding as Annie goes completely off the rails in her jealousy of Lillian’s confident, wealthy, glamorous new friend Helen (Rose Byrne). “You’re not fine,” Lillian says to Annie with compassion when she finally relieves her of maid of honor duties, although Annie doesn’t take it in the intended spirit.
Helen, of course, is just as desperate and insecure as Annie, stuck in a seemingly loveless marriage with a pair of stepkids who hate her. Her coping mechanisms are different, but she’s overcompensating just as much as Annie is, and it’s only when they drop their respective facades that they discover how much they have in common. Helen would probably connect more with Regan, who takes on the role of maid of honor with hyper-focus, meticulously managing every detail of Becky’s wedding until one disaster threatens to derail the whole event.
Bachelorette takes place primarily over the course of a single night, as Regan, Gena, and Katie frantically attempt to repair the wedding dress they’ve carelessly damaged before Becky has to wear it the next day. They experience just as much growth as Annie in a much shorter period of time, ending up in the same shakily hopeful position. Their lows are lower, and Headland revels in their destructive behavior, taking them to some truly dark places that Annie would never go.
When Annie mixes pills and alcohol, she makes inappropriate outbursts and gets escorted off a plane. When Katie does the same, she passes out and nearly dies. Annie’s biggest self-indulgence is the elaborate baked treats she used to make at her now-shuttered cake shop. For Gena and Katie, the equivalent vice is huge amounts of cocaine.
Yet their reactions to similar situations often mirror each other, just to different degrees. At Lillian’s engagement party, people keep mistaking random men for Annie’s nonexistent husband, and she awkwardly demurs. Gena’s response is much stronger when someone refers to her as “Mrs.” at Becky’s rehearsal dinner: “I’m not married, and I’m not an adult, either.”
These women are adults, though, and they’re not just reflections of the kind of stunted man-children familiar from Bridesmaids producer Judd Apatow’s successful bro comedies. Their growth comes from actually facing up to their issues, from understanding that their actions are hurtful, and that there are real people suffering the consequences of their irresponsible behavior. Bachelorette’s sense of humor is darker, but both movies pull off an impressive tonal balance, sometimes blindsiding the audience with affecting emotional moments amid the comedy.
It’s funny when Annie berates a teen girl looking for a “best friends forever” necklace at the jewelry store where she works, but it’s also an honest expression of her self-doubt. There’s morbid humor in Katie plaintively asking, “You had an abortion without me?” when Regan references helping Gena end a pregnancy, but it also contains true anguish and heartbreak. It’s easy to laugh at these women, and that also makes it easy to care about them. The specificity of the characters and their struggles resonates longer than any trend these movies were supposedly setting or following.
Both “Bridesmaids” and “Bachelorette” are streaming on Hulu beginning April 1.