Laugh hard at a truly funny film
At this point in what I laughingly refer to as my career, I feel exactly the same way about Kate McKinnon as I once felt about Bill Murray: There are not many films I see in a year that wouldn’t be improved with McKinnon in them.
McKinnon knocked Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy off the screen in every scene in
Ghostbusters, pulled the same stunt on Scarlett Johansson in the underrated Rough Night, and is now edging closer to top-billing as bestie Morgan to Mila Kunis’ Audrey in
The Spy Who Dumped Me.
One day, someone is going to write the perfect script to harness McKinnon’s loosely hinged genius, and that is going to be a very good day indeed to be doing this job.
In the meantime, sit back and watch as McKinnon – and the very game Kunis – elevate what might have been a pretty average offseason action comedy into a likeable and occasionally truly funny film.
Audrey’s boyfriend Drew – we learn in a surprisingly well-staged and grim opening – is actually a CIA agent.
(I can just imagine director Susanna Fogel telling her camera and colour-grading team to ‘‘make it look like Bourne’’. It works.)
For reasons that really don’t stand much examination, Drew (played by Justin Theroux) has left the plot’s McGuffin in a cupboard at Audrey and Morgan’s apartment.
So while Drew is getting his a... handed to him in various locations around central Europe, our plucky duo are thrust into that baggiest of all movie cliches: the amateurs who must become secret agents.
The Spy Who Dumped Me (lousy title) works best when McKinnon and Kunis are exploiting some enviable and unfakeable on-screen chemistry, trading dialogue – I’m guessing a lot of it improvised – while the guns fire and limbs are being snapped around them.
McKinnon is incapable of doing anything at all without trying – and mostly succeeding – to wring a laugh out of it. As the film wound into its third act, she made me snort a laugh just by making a meal out of locking a car door. That’s some Bill Murray-level magic right there.
Around the stars, Theroux is credible as the duplicitous Drew and Sam Heughan (Outlander) turns in a credible Bond audition as fellow agent Sebastian.
Gillian Anderson, Paul Rudd and Jane Curtin are all fine in support roles. McKinnon’s crushing on Anderson’s CIA chief – ‘‘oh my God, you’re Judi Dench’’ – is one of many meta gags, most of which stick.
Listen, I know you’re probably intending to see M:I6 this weekend if you haven’t already. And that’s fine. But if the theatre is sold out, give The Spy Who Dumped Me a hoon.
The action’s great, the jokes are mostly pretty good and the plot is about as credible. Surprisingly recommended.
He has won the Nobel prize for Literature for a body of witty and zeitgeisty novels assembled over a 30-year career. She has been the inspirational wife who stood beside him and tolerated the most selfobsessed expressions of his towering creativity.
He was married when they first met and therefore she should not be upset if he indulges in a little flirtation with the pretty young photographer who has been assigned to trail them in Stockholm.
But she has a larger axe to grind than we might suspect. And his string of fairly pitiable affairs is the least of the problem.
As played by Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce, the couple are a carousel of emotions, buried pasts and lives that once seemed about to take very different paths.
The Wife takes us back and forth from 1958, as the husband first tastes a little literary success, to 1992 and the days leading up to the Nobel ceremony.
We learn that she – Joan – was once a promising fiction writer, but she buried her ambitions in the face of 1950s attitudes to ‘‘women’s novels’’, as laid-out by the preening jackasses she works for at a big-city publisher. Meanwhile, he – Joe – is enjoying success with his first novel. Four decades later, surveying the self-congratulatory, allmale lineup at the Nobels, Joan has cause to wonder how much has changed.
The Wife is a showcase for two outstanding performances, terrific support work and exactly the sort of ringingly authentic and chewable dialogue we really don’t hear enough of.
Close turns in what might be the best performance of her career, showing us just enough of Joan’s reaction to her husband’s success and escalating boorishness to hint at the tectonic movements happening, and the eruption that must surely be coming.
Pryce does some wonderful things in the thankless role of the weak-willed, self-justifying, cowardly and duplicitous Joe. Pryce’s genius is to leave the character superficially publicly charming to the very end.
Around these two, Christian Slater as a predatory journalist determined to write Joe’s biography, Max Irons as the couple’s son, and Annie Starke (Close’s daughter), as the younger Joan, are particularly effective.
The Wife is a meticulously efficient film that creates its traps and misdirections out of convincingly portrayed emotions.
I don’t think I’ve relished a portrait of a marriage in delayed implosion quite so much since Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years. Bravo.
McKinnon made me snort a laugh just by making a meal out of locking a car door. That’s some Bill Murray-level magic right there.