National Post (National Edition)
MELISSA MCCARTHY’S NEAR-MISS MOVIE.
LIFE OF THE PARTY AIMS FOR THE MIDDLE AND HITS IT — WHICH IS AN ACHIEVEMENT
Life of the Party opens as Deanna (Melissa Mccarthy), dressed in a DIY sparkled “Proud Mom” sweatshirt, drops her daughter off at university. Her voice drawls in a folksy twang and she trips over herself as she tries to get in one more hug. As Deanna stumbles back into the car and the school fades from view, her husband blurts out that he wants a divorce. He has fallen in love with a local real estate personality and is going to sell their house. Devastated, Deanna escapes to her parents home where she resolves to return to school to finish her degree in archeology, two decades after dropping out.
For the first 15 minutes or so, an interminably long time for a comedy, the film feels like a secondtier and overstretched Mad TV sketch. Early scenes are rough and riddled with jokes that don’t land. Aside from inviting the audience to laugh at Deanna, who is more pitiable than funny, characters argue over sandwich meat and a dog almost gets shot.
Slowly things start to pick up, though, as Deanna discards her masquerade as a sexless mother, and the movie hits a comic stride. While generously about one-third of the jokes in the film never work, one sequence in particular borders on genius. It takes place at a restaurant and takes the idea of cosmic coincidences to poetic extremes, as a delirious quickening montage stacks joke upon joke until the wind is knocked out of the audience. If the rest of the film was able to channel this rhythm, Life of the Party could have been a truly great film.
That sequence, along with the largely likable cast, makes for an overall pleasant comedy. Maya Rudolph plays Deanna’s best friend, and is an endearing horndog in fuzzy socks. She steals every scene she’s in. Gillian Jacobs, playing Helen aka The Coma Girl, brings a much-needed absurdism to the proceedings, adding a perversity to an otherwise genial film. Most of the rest of the cast is good too, offering a fairly balanced range of humour and characterizations.
Aside from a few early jabs at Deanna, Life of the Party is a gentle movie that refuses cruelty. All the villains are humanized, and generally speaking, everyone more or less gets along. It feels like something that De anna herself would watch, as it isa world where mothers and daughters hang out, and everyone learns important lessons about selfacceptance. It is inoffensive and harmless, which should be taken as a compliment and crack. While the film is little more than a reminder that motherhood contains multitudes, this pat message is delivered with a certain amount of sincerity, so it’s more cute than cloying.
Life of the Party has all the elements of a Sunday rainy-day movie. It is easy to follow, has intermittent laughs and ultimately, will lose nothing by being screened at home. It aims for the middle and hits it, which should not be an achievement, but in the dire landscape of middling studio comedies, it unquestionably does better than most.