Bridesmaids (2011 film)


Bridesmaids is a 2011 American comedy film directed by Paul Feig from a screenplay by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. It stars Wiig as a woman who experiences a series of misfortunes after being asked to serve as maid of honor for her best friend, played by Maya Rudolph. The ensemble cast also features Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy and Chris O'Dowd.
Actresses Mumolo and Wiig wrote the screenplay after the latter was cast in Judd Apatow's comedy Knocked Up. Upon its theatrical release in the United States on May 13, 2011, Bridesmaids was a critical and commercial success. It grossed over $306 million worldwide on a $32.5 million budget, and surpassed Knocked Up to become the top-grossing Apatow Productions film to date. At the 84th Academy Awards, McCarthy was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Wiig and Mumolo for Best Original Screenplay.
Bridesmaids has served as a touchstone for discussion about women in comedy. Several publications have ranked it among the best comedy films of the 21st century.

Plot

Annie Walker is a young, single woman living in Milwaukee. Following the Great Recession, her bakery went out of business. She now works a stressful, underpaid job at a jewelry store and shares an apartment with obnoxious roommates. She regularly has casual sex with the wealthy, self-absorbed Ted. The only positive presence in Annie's life is her lifelong best friend, Lillian.
When Lillian becomes engaged to her boyfriend Doug, she asks Annie to be her maid of honor. At the engagement party, Annie meets Lillian's other bridesmaids: Lillian's cousin Rita; Lillian's coworker Becca; Doug's sister Megan; and Helen, the wife of Doug's boss. Annie and Helen are jealous of each other's friendships with Lillian and compete for her attention.
On the way home from the engagement party, Annie is pulled over by police officer Nathan Rhodes due to her erratic driving. She completes a sobriety test, which she passes, however a ticket is written for broken brake lights. The pair get talking and Officer Rhodes realises that Annie was the owner of ‘Cake Baby’ Annie’s former bakery. Annie looks upset about being given a ticket, which Officer Rhodes agrees to remove as long as she gets her tail lights fixed.
Lillian and her bridesmaids have lunch at a Brazilian restaurant chosen by Annie. Annie then takes them to a high-end bridal-dress boutique. With the exception of Helen, the women are all stricken with food poisoning. As Rita vomits into a toilet at the boutique, Becca vomits on Rita and Megan defecates into the bathroom sink. While wearing an haute couture wedding dress, Lillian tries to rush through traffic to reach another bathroom; she then succumbs to diarrhea, defecating in the street.
Annie's subsequent suggestion for a bachelorette party at Lillian's parents' lake house is overruled in favor of a Las Vegas trip planned by Helen. On the plane there, Annie accepts a sedative and liquor from Helen to alleviate her fear of flying, and becomes intoxicated and belligerent toward airline staff. She then starts hallucinating and suffers a paranoid breakdown that culminates in her being apprehended by an Air Marshall. The plane makes an emergency landing, and the party takes a bus home. Lillian then allows Helen to take over the planning of the bridal shower and wedding upon Annie's request.
Meanwhile, Annie grows closer to Nathan Rhodes and as former regular customer at Annie's bakery, he repeatedly encourages her to open a new one, though she is apprehensive. After a romantic night together, she abruptly leaves when Nathan surprises her with baking supplies the next morning.
After being fired from her job for a profanity-laden argument with a teenage customer and then being evicted by her roommates, Annie moves in with her mother. She travels to Helen's home in Chicago for Lillian's Parisian-themed bridal shower—an idea of Annie's that Helen had previously rejected. When Helen upstages Annie's heartfelt gift by surprising Lillian with a trip to Paris, Annie flies into a rage, loudly berating the two and destroying the decorations. The subsequent argument between Annie and Lillian culminates in Annie storming out and Lillian disinviting her from the wedding.
While driving home, Annie's still-broken tail lights lead to a car accident. The responding officer is Nathan, who admonishes her for not taking responsibility for herself. Ted arrives shortly afterward, offering Annie a ride. When he asks Annie to perform fellatio on him as he drives, she demands to be let out of the car and walks home.
Megan visits Annie, motivating her to take control of her life. So she fixes her car and tries to reconcile with Nathan, who ignores her. On the day of the wedding, Helen comes to Annie, begging for help finding a missing Lillian. During their search, Helen tearfully confesses that while she is sought after for her event-planning skills, she does not have any true friends and feels unsatisfied in her marriage.
With some begrudging help from Nathan, Annie and Helen find Lillian in her apartment, having become overwhelmed by Helen's extravagant wedding planning and afraid of leaving her life in Milwaukee. Annie reconciles with Lillian and resumes her role as maid of honor. After the wedding, Annie and Helen hug. Nathan then arrives unexpectedly to pick her up. Annie and he kiss before riding away in Nathan's police car.

Cast

Major uncredited appearances include: Jon Hamm as Ted, Annie's sex buddy; Grammy Award-winning accordionist, pianist, and composer Nick Ariondo as the accordion player; and Emmy, Drama Desk and Grammy Award winner Pat Carroll as the old woman in the car.
The film's co-writers, Wiig and Annie Mumolo, appear together when Mumolo plays the nervous woman on the plane, while director Paul Feig appears uncredited as a wedding guest.
Paul Rudd was to appear as a man whom Annie goes on a blind date with, but the scene was cut from the final film.
Mia Rose Frampton appears briefly as a thirteen-year-old girl who argues with Annie in the jewelry store; the film's Blu-ray release includes an extended, ten minute scene of improvised dialogue between the two.
Wilson Phillips appear as themselves late in the film when they perform their song "Hold On".

Production

Writing

The script, originally titled Maid of Honor, was written by actress and screenwriter Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. Friends for years, they met at The Groundlings, a Los Angeles-based improvisational comedy troupe where they wrote sketches with one another, in the early 2000s. The basic premise for the film originated in 2006, shortly after Wiig was cast in the supporting role of a passive-aggressive cable television executive in producer Judd Apatow's comedy film Knocked Up. Recognizing her comedic talent, Apatow asked Wiig if she had any ideas for a screenplay herself – a practice which had previously led to Steve Carell's idea for The 40-Year-Old Virgin – and she and Mumolo soon came up with Bridesmaids. Over the following years, writing commenced, with Wiig working on Saturday Night Live in New York City and Mumolo grinding out the script in Los Angeles. The two would meet on weekends and conduct semi-regular table reads of drafts for Apatow to get his suggestions and notes. Filmmaker Paul Feig came across Wiig and Mumolo's script in 2007. When Feig signed on as director and the script got the greenlight for production in 2010, Feig said, "There was an edict from Hollywood where they were all going, 'Okay this is a movie starring a bunch of women. If this works, we'll greenlight more, and if it doesn't, we won't...I was really sweating because if this didn't work then I'm basically the man who killed movies for women for eternity. So, thank God it worked."

Casting and filming

Several actresses auditioned for the role of Megan, including Rebel Wilson and Busy Philipps, the latter of whom had worked with Apatow and Feig on their comedy-drama television series Freaks and Geeks. Wilson, who improvised for Apatow and Feig for an hour during her audition, impressed them so much that she was later cast in the smaller role of Brynn. It marked her first appearance in an American production, and she allegedly received $3,500, all of which went toward paying fees to join the Screen Actors Guild. Mindy Kaling read for the role of Lillian, eventually losing to Wiig's Saturday Night Live colleague Maya Rudolph. Rose Byrne initially also auditioned for Lillian, but later took the opportunity to read Helen. Byrne was eventually chosen as the nemesis because she wasn't a comedian as Feig feared the character would be "coming out to be too arch if we had a funny woman doing it." Greta Gerwig and Judy Greer also auditioned for unspecified roles.
Bridesmaids was budgeted at $32.5 million. Although primarily set in Milwaukee and Chicago, principal photography took place in Los Angeles. Production designer Jefferson Sage, who has worked with Apatow and Paul Feig since their Freaks and Geeks days, noted that the first fact that appealed to him about the project "was that you had these two disparate worlds: There was Annie's world in Milwaukee, and then there was Helen's world in Chicago. It immediately drew this dichotomy between the rivalry that developed between them." However, Sage acknowledged that it was a challenge to find "architecture that would give us those Midwestern worlds. Chicago is a beautiful, distinctive city architecturally, and restricted views of downtown L.A. feel like Chicago." The production decided to use the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden as the location for Lillian and Dougie's wedding. Additional scenes where Annie meets Officer Rhodes on the highways between Milwaukee and Chicago were filmed in Oxnard, California, which Sage described as a "broad, flat, green area away from mountains."