By Nicole Armour

The most discussed set-piece in Paul Feig’s hilarious Bridesmaids sees the bride’s attendants contracting food poisoning while visiting a sterile bridal salon. While clothed in objectionable, expensive garments, their bodies rebel and the group, including the bride, starts vomiting and shitting everywhere. In wedding tradition, the ritual of dress shopping is meant to waylay the bride’s apprehensions about her physicality—flaws can be cinched by tulle and satin—and transform her into the doll she’s always fantasized about being. Of course, the corollary of this achievement is forcing obliging friends to don dresses so irredeemable that their wearers can’t come close to the bride’s loveliness. (This form of female competitiveness resembles the conduct of naked mole rats, wherein the queen secures her reign over the breeding males by spreading hormones via her urine that render other females temporarily infertile.) In life and in movies, playing a bridesmaid is a unique source of manipulation and humiliation and IS therefore an easy joke. Bridesmaids trounces this concept by refusing to denigrate the characters or the actors by merely costuming them in silly dresses. Instead, the tradition itself is attacked with egalitarianism and gusto; they literally shit all over it.

Female competition is still present in Bridesmaids, but it’s the nuanced kind, providing character development and poignancy rather than just narrative-fuelling conflict. Friends since childhood, Annie (Kristen Wiig, also the film’s co-writer) and Lillian (Maya Rudolph) find their bond severely tested when Lillian decides to marry. The wedding preamble coincides with a low point in Annie’s life, and she struggles to fulfill her duties as maid of honor while questioning her own trajectory and lamenting that the nature and pleasures of her relationship with Lillian must inevitably change. This threat takes the physical form of fellow bridesmaid Helen (Rose Byrne), whom Lillian met through her fiancé: she’s beautiful, capable, wealthy, and desperate to overtake Annie as both maid of honor and BFF. Each contender possesses what the other one lacks—Annie has close friendships and Helen has everything else—and they embark on a bare-knuckle contest for supremacy. The bridal party is filled out by a sampling of women picked from disparate parts of Lillian’s life: Ellie Kemper as an inexperienced newlywed, Wendi McLendon-Covey as a beleaguered mother of multiple boys (“There’s semen everywhere!”), and scene-stealing Melissa McCarthy as a mannish, supremely confident individualist.

Much has been made of Bridesmaids’ gross and bawdy humour, or rather the fact that it is women who are indulging in it. (The film opens with Annie struggling through a bad bout of selfish sex with Jon Hamm, as a lothario too detached to let her stay the whole night; to mitigate her disappointment and hurt pride, she performs a terribly funny, surprisingly accurate penis impersonation for Lillian over breakfast.) It’s strange to assume that women should forego bodily humour given that our culture insists that their physicality be directly linked to their sense of value. Further, significant moments in women’s lives are inextricably linked to the body (menstruation, sex, pregnancy, mothering, dealing with shitting and vomiting babies), which indicates that female bodies are both astonishingly transformable and are, stereotypically, too disgusting for many men to stand. (Sex is an exception, depending on how nasty a woman wants to get). It’s presumed that women aren’t dirty because the thought makes men uncomfortable, and Bridesmaids thankfully shits all over this too. Annie’s decline is caused by the failure of her business “Cake Baby,” whose name underscores the extent to which she’s derailed by cultural expectations she doesn’t have the self-possession to disregard. It’s twee, telescopes the regret that, at an advanced age, she hasn’t had a baby, and is linked to the bullshit, family-values revival of decorative cupcakes meant to reintegrate women into perverse expressions of fastidious domesticity. Annie’s business didn’t fail because of her inability, but because it required her inauthentic willingness to be self-deprecating and cute.

During the film, Annie runs past a poster for the film 27 Dresses (2008) and, seeing it, yells that Katherine Heigl is a liar. It’s a throwaway joke, but a multi-faceted one: in a Vanity Fair article, Heigl notoriously called Judd Apatow, her director in Knocked Up (2007) as well as a Bridesmaids producer, “a little sexist.” Some have argued that connecting himself with Bridesmaids constitutes Apatow’s effort to address this criticism; if so, it’s hardly necessary. One of Apatow’s greatest accomplishments to date, the short-lived TV series Freaks and Geeks (co-created with Feig), features as one of its central characters Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini), a smart girl often at odds with her peers, who is torn (as everyone is) between observing her own values and adapting them in order to be liked. Naturalistic, flawed, questioning and empathetic, Lindsay is one of several of Freaks and Geeks’ exceedingly honest portraits of teenage girls, which are without rival in TV or film. For their part, Annie and Lillian are comparably commendable depictions of women in their thirties, as was Leslie Mann’s Debbie in Knocked Up—which not only renders Heigl’s charge against Apatow highly arguable, but dismisses the fine work of her co-star.

In 27 Dresses (in many ways a fitting counterpart to Bridesmaids), Heigl’s always-the-bridesmaid character is so besotted with romantic fantasies that she plans other people’s weddings, clips marriage announcements from the newspaper’s society section, and only applies herself to her job because she’s in love with her boss; further, the film’s central plot point sees her vying for said boss’ attention with her duplicitous, sexier sister. Scripted and directed by women, 27 Dresses seems confident that its female target audience will agree that being a woman is just a series of humiliations until we lock down a man, plan our own wedding, and become legitimate citizens in the process. Bridesmaids, on the other hand, presents women with pasts and of an age to have accrued life experience. The link between Annie and Lillian is of such intimacy and constancy that Lillian’s impending marriage is merely a brief hurdle over which the defining, evolving friendship will inevitably leap.

The box-office performance of Bridesmaids has been closely watched since, unfortunately, the film carries the heavy mantle of determining the viability of every female-centered comedy in the future. But placing Bridesmaids amidst a wave of like films that haven’t even been made yet keeps us from appreciating what it’s achieved in the here and now. Bridesmaids has the kind of simplicity and idealism that comes from writers, directors and actors working with confidence, intelligence, and mutual comfort. It is, quite simply, the best American comedy in ages, and one humble, riotously funny example is a good place to start.