HIT AND MISSUS
Melissa McCarthy’s a divorcée who gets her groove back in funny-ish Life of the Party
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 second-tier 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 Deanne, 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 Deanne discards her masquerade as a sexless mother, and the movie hits its comic stride. While, generously, about one-third of the jokes in the film never work, one sequence in particular borders on genius. It happens 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 were 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 a.k.a. 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 characterization.
Aside from a few early jabs at Deanna, Life of the Party is a gentle movie that rejects cruelty. All the villains are humanized and, generally speaking, everyone more or less gets along. It feels like something Deanna herself would watch, since it is a world where mothers and daughters hang out, and everyone learns important lessons about self-acceptance. It is inoffensive and harmless, which should be taken as both compliment and dig. 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.