Every
actor knows it’s harder to be funny than tragic, yet Sandra Bullock and
Melissa McCarthy make it look like rolling off a log in The Heat. And when that
log catches fire, the criminals in Boston turn into cinders.
By the very fact of its existence, director Paul
Feig’s The Heat is good news, since the buddy genre for women, as miniscule
as it’s been (and with the one exception of 1987’s Outrageous Fortune with
Bette Midler and Shelley Long), has been in melodrama. And traditionally,
female comics even including Lucille Ball, and her straight-person/cohort
Vivian Vance, and—going backwards—Imogene Coca, and even Martha Raye have had
to stick within the smaller screen (not so bad these days to be on television,
of course). Tina Fey has jumped to feature films, the exception that makes the
rule. Bridesmaids, as wonderfully comic as it was, and Feig’s breakthrough
work, was a group tour de force. And to go one further, The Heat has lodged
itself into a male-dominated genre, the buddy-cop movie.
There are all sorts of things to say about this, the most
obvious being that this is exactly what feminist and other critics have been
crying out for. Moreover, there is a female screenwriter, Katie
Dippold (“Parks and Recreation”), as icing on the cake.
Wow! Does that ever sound pretentious, especially after
you’ve been LOL’ing like a mad hyena for nearly two hours (and were still sorry
to see the film end) at the antics of Sandra
Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. Finally we have two high-profile women actors
who aren’t afraid to take pratfalls, to look ridiculous. I can’t think of
anything funnier, to be blunt, than McCarthy squeezing herself through a car
window. Her size, her messy look, are not at odds with her appeal, though; as
she says to Bullock, “I put out my sexuality through motion.”
As FBI special agent Sarah Ashburn, Bullock is an
overachiever with few social skills from New York, newly arrived in Boston and
trying to get a promotion and impress her boss by solving some murders. The
only thing is, this turf belongs to somebody else: Shannon Mullins (McCarthy),
a detective for the Boston Police Department with a street approach and attitude-plus.
Which method, and which woman, will win out is the ostensible topic of the film.
The Heat, while about criminal busting and bashing, is also
about the look, and the Makeover, that cinematic staple. And it’s Mullins who
has the better sense of style—or, anyway, street style. When she yanks the
barrette from the side of Ashburn’s prim schoolgirlish bob, and Ashburn tries
to defend herself, Mullins says: Sure, I wear a barrette, but it’s where it
should be, on the top of my head. She’s a hip mama, comfortable in her skin,
where the by-the-numbers Ashburn is awkward as all get-out.
In their version of the odd couple, or Laurel and Hardy,
they learn from each other after some initial hostility, their friendship
expands—and look out, world! The film also takes on the question of how to get
ahead professionally in a man’s world, while touching on issues of family and
relationships.
That’s a tall order, but the laughs and even the ribaldry of
the film carry it out. “Was he a hearing man?” is the tart query from Mullins
when Ashburn tells her she was married once, a corrective comment on Ashburn’s
interpersonal style.
Brisk editing by Jay Deuby and Brent White keeps up the pace
throughout The Heat, the jumpy energy signaled by a great use of Isley Brothers
music in the movie’s beginning. It will most definitely be an action movie. But
The Heat is more about finding strength through rapprochement. Guys used to
call it teamwork. Women call it being friends.
On another, even more universal level, the movie takes up
ways of being. “I’m intuitive. I say what I feel. I’m usually right,” declares
McCarthy-as-Mullins. The more studious Ashburn begs to differ: “It’s not about
luck” she avers, with the hopeful determination of the autodidact.
This talk is all to the good, especially in a rollicking
film, but what makes it work ultimately is not the script, or maybe even the
direction. It’s all about the timing. When to deliver the line. Bullock and McCarthy
are on par with each other here. But it’s McCarthy’s film, as fine as Bullock
is.
As for the critic who called McCarthy tractor-sized—you know
who you are—let’s be charitable and say he probably meant tractor-sized talent.
Theresa Montierro's
Film Review: The Heat
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