Universal
If Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were to run for the Presidency in 2016, they’d probably stand a greater chance of securing the vote than any of the current candidates from either party. Now, there’s no “polling data” or “evidence” or “facts” to back this up, but it’s one of those things that feels true, and even that feeling is a legitimate indicator of the near-universal popularity of the Fey/Poehler ticket. They’re women of the people, both revered as not just the funniest women currently walking the planet, but the most prodigiously talented humorists of either gender. It seems like Poehler and Fey can’t make a joint appearance in public without inspiring another rash of headlines effusing over how effortlessly hilarious both women are. (Some, admittedly, on this very site.)
It’s a bit perplexing, then, how much difficulty these women have faced when parleying their success on the small screen into a block-busting presence at the movies. This weekend’s grown-up raunchy comedy Sisters marks the the Poehler-Fey team’s second attempt to plant their flag on the battleground of the local multiplex, the first having quietly come and gone in 2008. That film, the odd bird Baby Mama, made a paltry $64 million against its $30 million budget, and neither that modest box-office intake nor the lukewarm reviews were expected of the twin poster gals of smarted-up belly-laugh comedy. Their respective TV vehicles, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation, were among the most critically lauded and buzzed-about of the shows’ late-2000s / early 2010s heyday. Something blocked their path from Point A of total TV domination to the Point B of a Kristen Wiig-caliber triumph in the tradition of Bridesmaids.
It would be a shame if not enough people had the courage to elbow through the Force Awakens mob to see Sisters this weekend, because it is indeed the worthy Bridesmaids-level victory Fey and Poehler have long deserved. One peek at the credits for Sisters reveals just why this film works when Baby Mama didn’t, and justifies all the Bridesmaids comparisons, all with one name. The stealth MVP of Sisters is writer Paula Pell, whom we spoke to yesterday, the deliriously funny woman behind a pair of deliriously funny women.
Pell’s resumé reads like a laundry list of the best comedy to come out of the years following the new millennium. Pell first fell in with Fey and Poehler while serving a tour of duty on the Saturday Night Live writing staff, and from there, she migrated with Fey to a 30 Rock staff gig (and an onscreen cameo as the wife of henpecked producer Pete Hornberger) and scattered work on Parks and Recreation (as well as another cameo, this time as Ron Swanson’s salt-of-the-earth mother). Judd Apatow took a shine to her too, bringing her in to punch up the scripts for Bridesmaids and This Is 40. She’s got something of a magic touch, massaging in a profane sweetness to every project she puts her name on. Pell is the truest author of Sisters, not Fey and Poehler, just as writer-director Michael McCullers was the real voice behind Baby Mama. The Fey-Poehler brain trust is only as good as its writer, and in Pell they’ve found a simpatico collaborator whose sense of humor nicely syncs up with their own.
McCullers was hardly some gun-for-hire that the studio wrangled for the picture. Fey and McCullers went way back, all the way to their days as SNL chums during his brief stint with the sketch institution from 1997 to 1998. He left the show and quickly moved on to bigger and more profitable things, joining forces with Mike Myers to pen the scripts for the first two films built around a jaunty spy character Myers had been developing called Austin Powers. He’s not an unfunny guy, and Baby Mama has a handful of evergreen quotables that prove his chops as a gag-man. As Fey’s baby-crazy career woman attends a Lamaze class with Poehler’s rough-around-the-edges surrogate, the instructor recommends they massage the area around the birth canal with “EVOO” to prevent tearing. Fey mutters to Poehler with perfect incredulousness: “I think she wants me to rub olive oil on your taint?” The line reads as classic Fey, brassy and crude, but generating its laugh from the absurdity of the crude component — it’s not that “taint” is a funny word in and of itself, just a ridiculous one in the context of a birthing class.
But McCullers’ directorial instincts would clash with Poehler and Fey’s comic personae in a larger sense over the course of the film. Baby Mama is a determinedly traditional sort of film behind all of the new-normal single-mother posturing. The motivation for Fey’s character’s monomaniacal need to have a baby never gets any explanation beyond the self-evident truth that that’s what women do, and the odd-couple dynamic between the leading ladies is typical and broad. This same friction between the established persona of the talent onscreen and the director behind the camera defined this summer’s Trainwreck as well, as the unabashedly bawdy Amy Schumer was shoehorned into a decidedly old-fashioned rom-com plot by Judd Apatow.
Pell, conversely, speaks Fey and Poehler’s language. Her style of writing, which favors tossed-off one-liners that tumble out one after the other, turned Bridesmaids into a relentless uproar and now it’s made a laugh riot out of Sisters. As the chronically irresponsible Kate and the micromanaging Maura, Fey and Poehler play off one another like oil and water — but at the same time, they chatter to one another in the sort of sibling-vernacular that develops between people who have stayed close all their lives. Pell knows how to write the natural chemistry that Fey and Poehler have shown on SNL and their delightful awards hosting appearances, the sort of buddy-buddy rapport that’s endeared them to the public.
But audiences also come to a Poehler/Fey joint with certain expectations of the film’s thematic underpinnings. It’s not a classic collaboration between the two without some mature meditations on the complexities of female relationships, and Pell handles the subject with ease. The central conflict in the film stems from the friction between Kate’s tornado of dysfunction — a threadbare bank account, an inability to hold down a job, a wayward kid — and Maura’s pathological need to help everyone, which presents problems of its own. Pell sets up the earthshaking party around which the film is centered as a crucial opportunity for the reserved Maura to cut loose and enjoy herself. The importance of being and appearing responsible and respectable is a key component of the film’s approach toward femininity; accepting the duties of adulthood without letting them sap your joie de vivre is the middle ground that Pell clearly demarcates as the fullest, richest life for these two characters.
The clearest parallel between Sisters and Pell’s touch-ups on Bridesmaids comes through Maya Rudolph’s suburban queen bee Brinda. Clearly modeled after Rose Byrne’s infuriatingly perfect Helen in Bridesmaids, Brinda tormented the girls during their younger years and has upgraded their rivalry for middle age by aggressively asserting her perfect home, fulfilling family life, and maddening happiness in our heroines’ faces during a trip to the grocery store. Pell understands that competitions such as this are all too common among women, but she has the smarts to land Rudolph’s character on a redemptive note, suggesting (just as she did in Bridesmaids) that solidarity is a far more fulfilling state.
Pell understands what makes the Tina ‘n’ Amy brand tick, and fortunately for both her and us, she intuits so much of their dynamic because she recognizes it in her own comedy. Where Baby Mama occasionally worked at cross purposes with itself, Sisters fires on all cylinders, the writer and stars working in perfect tandem to achieve a comedic fever pitch. In one of the film’s most winningly goofy sequences, Kate and Maura bust out one of their girlhood dance routines for the collected attendees of their big bash. It should be pretty embarrassing, but it’s not, because they’ve got the awkward dance moves down pat. Before they set out on the dance floor, Maura reassures Kate, “It’ll be cool because we’re doing it.” They strike a chord with one another, perfectly matching each other’s movements. Pell, Fey, and Poehler make this synchronicity look effortless, but Sisters proves just how precious and rare it is.
