May is apparently the month for movies about marriage.
No fewer than three new releases deal with some nuance of nuptials, but right from the promo poster, the Judd Apatow produced "Bridesmaids" is set apart from the pack.
Co-stars Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper slouch against a brick wall looking more like high school hellions than a proper wedding party.
Reductionists have labeled the film "the Hangover for girls," but co-writer Wiig, during a recent visit to Atlanta said it just isn't so.
"It isn't a chick flick," said the Saturday Night Live star seated in the English garden at the Mansion on Peachtree with McClendon-Covey. "It's not trying not to be one, but it wasn't written in response to anything. It was just a funny story Annie [Mumolo] and I wanted to tell."
The story is about Annie (Wiig), a cute kook whose life is rapidly spiraling out of control just as her best friend Lillian (Rudolph) announces her engagement and asks her lifelong friend to be her maid-of-honor. Annie attempts to rise to the occasion, but is quickly derailed by the super-rich and perfectly poised Helen (Byrne), who is in the running for Lillian's next-to-best friend.
As Annie fails at one pal-of-the-bride task after another, her personal life is in tatters. Her weird roomies show her the door, she offends a guy who actually means her some good and she has abandoned the one talent she seems to have.
It is about the most out of control run-up to a wedding ever. "Weddings have become so expensive and so crazy," McClendon-Covey said. "For the bride to say, ‘I just want my day', it is really your year and a half."
McClendon-Covey, an eight wedding bridal party vet (including her own) knows of what she speaks. Secretly engaged to husband, Greg Covey, long before their 1996 wedding, McClendon-Covey had plenty of time to plan and re-plan her special day.
"It was getting out of control," she said. When the wedding day finally came, it was "hot as Hades," said the actress who portrayed the miserable Rita in the film. A power grid failure resulted in a regional blackout forcing her bridesmaids to show up with wet hair (no blow dryers) or show up late since a few couldn't exit their garages. Shooting a movie about a wedding gone wrong was a lot more fun, McClendon-Covey said.
While Wiig may bristle at the "Hangover" comparison, the ladies recently spoofed the film in a Harper's Bazaar spread titled "The Shopover." The gang posed in high-end designer shoes and dresses while apparently lamenting a buying binge the night before. It looked like a lot of good girl fun, which Wiig and McClendon-Covey agreed played out on set.
"When I would look at the call sheet and I wasn't on it that day, I would get upset," McClendon-Covey said.
An absence could mean missing out on the hi-jinks that happen when you corral six female comedians in front of a camera well into the wee morning hours, such as the time they all wore suits like director Paul Feig, or when they watched Wiig wig out over and over again in the Vegas-bound airplane scene, or when they all got punchy as they ad-libbed lines.
"We did a scripted version to get into it," Wiig said, "but we wanted these ladies to do their thing."
And so they did, enough to beg the question about just how far women in comedy have come in recent years.
Wiig lets out a deep sigh before answering.
"People have been talking about women in comedy and there have been women in comedy forever. It's just comedy," she said. "If it's funny, it's funny."
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