Girl Most Likely (2013)

So much average

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

There is a genre of film - this one and Switch come to mind - that depict the denizens of New York City as absurdly neurotic fast-talkers who can't seem to find happiness but who, you realize as the movie hits the 5-minute mark, are all secretly pleased about their excruciating personalities and their irrelevant lives. Pleased. Pleased, when they should be looking in the mirror and telling themselves to snap out of it and get over themselves. I am here to tell you that these movie characters are all figments of some writer's lazy imagination. Do not be afraid to move to New York, it's a lovely place with all kinds of nice people. If you move there - specifically, to the island of Manhattan, either east of west of Central Park or points south - you will find that if you love the city, it will love you back. It's as simple as that. And I promise you will never meet idiots like the preposterous fictions in these movies.

Kristen Wiig should, in theory, be able to elevate any film or show she's in simply by showing up and being her smart, clever, fearless self. With a well-timed deadpan aside or an amusingly awkward physical bit, she makes decent material better and good material great. This is a notion that "Girl Most Likely" pushes to the absolute limits. Wiig finds herself sadly outmatched in this comedy crammed with wacky and tacky characters—types, all of them—in which she's stuck functioning as the uptight, frustrated straight woman in the middle. She rarely gets a chance to shine because her role is so underwritten. Husband-and-wife directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have had success in the past with inspired subject matter, such as the excellent "American Splendor" from 2003. Here, they're working from a script by Michelle Morgan that's chock-full of contrived situations and very few moments that actually ring true. It contains a menagerie of quirky weirdos: people we're clearly meant to laugh at for being ridiculous, delusional, pathetic or all of the above, up until the precise moment that we're supposed to join the film in doing a 180-degree turn and embracing them for being exactly who they are. This is the formulaic, inevitable journey Wiig's character, Imogene, must travel. At the film's start, she's a well-to-do Manhattan magazine writer attending a society event with her obviously evasive longtime boyfriend. It's clear she doesn't quite fit in with these old-moneyed women, though—she doesn't have the right pedigree or wear the right dress or say just the right, vapid thing in conversation. With head-spinning swiftness, Imogene loses her boyfriend, job and apartment and fakes a suicide attempt, all of which plays out in broad, sitcommy fashion. And so this once- promising playwright must return to her hometown, a place she's been running from her whole adult life: the cheesy slab of boardwalk known as Ocean City, N.J. (In case we didn't know we were in New Jersey, "Girl Most Likely" features really obvious song choices on the soundtrack from both Bon Jovi AND Bruce Springsteen.) There, she is forced to coexist in a cramped, cluttered beach house with her blowsy, hard- gambling mother, Zelda (Annette Bening in a husky accent) and Zelda's younger boyfriend, an alleged CIA agent who goes by the name George Bousche (say it out loud). He's played by Matt Dillon. There's also Imogene's younger brother, Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald), who's obsessed with crabs and appears to be mentally challenged in some unspecified way; and Lee ("Glee" star Darren Criss), the twenty-something who's renting out Imogene's childhood bedroom. Bob Balaban gets even less to work with as Imogene and Ralph's father, whom they haven't seen in decades because their mother told them he was dead. This development is also supposed to be funny, and poignant, but never succeeds either way. It's not enough to assemble an esteemed cast—you have to give them something worthwhile to, you know, do. Criss, in his first major role in a feature film, is the only person to emerge completely unscathed. While his character may seem impossibly sweet and charming, Criss has a natural likability and some nice chemistry with Wiig—more so than anybody else in the cast, certainly. ("Glee" fans will be happy to know that the leader of the Warblers does indeed get to belt out a suddenly ubiquitous, '90s boy-band tune.) But the desperate straining for laughs isn't nearly so off-putting as the abrupt tonal shift "Girl Most Likely" makes as it trudges toward its conclusion. The film encourages us to enjoy feeling superior and smug to Imogene's relatives and their schlocky surroundings, just as she does, then goes all soft and gooey and wants us to love them. This is particularly difficult to do because they're not so much recognizable people as a collection of flimsy eccentricities, shriveling up in the sunshine of the Jersey shore.

The cinematic equivalent of being forced to breastfeed a teething dolphin, "Girl Most Likely" stars actress Kristen Wiig as Imogene, a middle aged playwright who stages a suicide in an attempt to win back her ex. This bizarre gesture eventually leads Imogene on a quest to find her long-lost father."Girl Most Likely" was written by Michelle Morgan, whose script wastes time on a wholly superfluous first act. It was directed by Shari Springer and Robert Pulcini, who manage nothing of note. Rubbing salt into the wounds of wounded viewers is a small cameo by Whit Stillman, a director renowned for several sophisticated, interesting comedies. What's he doing in a film like this? Actor Matt Dillon steals the show as a bizarre, bathrobe wearing samurai.3/10 - Worth no viewings. See Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco".

Upon its festival release, Girl Most Likely garnered generally negative reviews from critics. Christopher Schobert from film blog The Playlist called the film "a big-screen sitcom, elevated by Kristen Wiig and Annette Bening". He wrote that Wiig's "likability oozes from every scene in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's occasionally winning, a touch too sitcom-y, but often very funny look at one woman's offbeat family and her attempts at discovering just what went wrong on the road to success. It is not, to be sure, Bridesmaids-style humor, and never reaches that blockbuster's belly laugh count. But the film doesn't lack for moments of inspired comedy, and I expect it to find an audience." In his review, Justin Chang from Variety felt that "an able cast, led by Kristen Wiig's prickly lead turn, saves this uneven, excessively quirky but ultimately ingratiating story Offering another sly snapshot of the filmmakers' native New York, a la The Nanny Diaries and The Extra Man this soft-bellied crowdpleaser should post modest numbers in specialty play and DVD/VOD rotation. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 20% rating based on 85 reviews with the site's consensus: "Largely witless and disappointingly dull, Girl Most Likely strands the gifted Kristen Wiig in a blandly hollow foray into scattershot sitcom territory."