by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Three nights ago Charles and I watched a surprisingly good
recent movie, The Boss, the latest
vehicle for the Saturday Night Live
alumna Melissa McCarthy (as I’ve noted in these pages before, an apprenticeship
on Saturday Night Live seems as de
rigueur for aspiring comedians these days
as a shot on the Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson once did). I’m generally not a fan of modern comedies —
while dramatic films have benefited from the breakdown of the Production Code
(but also suffered from it in that literalness and explicitness too often take
the place of imagination) and action films have improved with the advent of CGI
(even though a lot of the comic-book movies have action scenes that look digitally created and I sometimes find myself
missing the craftspersonship of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen with their
stop-motion animated models), there’s generally no contest between the comedies
of yore — the vehicles for Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd in the silent era
and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields and Abbott and Costello
(whom I wouldn’t have put in the pantheon but I’m getting to respect more and
more as Charles and I work our way through the boxed set of their complete
movies for Universal, which include 28 of their total of 36) — and the comedies
of today. Still, there’ve been exceptions — Stranger than Fiction,
Little Miss Sunshine and the amazing,
unexpected Kabluey — and though The
Boss isn’t quite in that league, it’s considerably better than the
common run of comedies today. The Blu-Ray disc we got it on offered you the
choice of the 99-minute theatrical release (rated R “for sexual content,
language and brief drug use”) or a 104-minute unrated version, and I went for
the unrated version and I’m pretty sure I know which scene they had to delete
to get an “R” rating instead of the “NC-17” kiss of death (one in which McCarthy is shown spraying artificial tanning solution on her private parts).
The basic plot casts
McCarthy (in a film directed by her husband, Ben Falcone, with both of them and
Steve Mallory as screenwriters and the daughter of Falcone and McCarthy, Vivian
Falcone, playing McCarthy’s character as a 10-year-old whose foster parents
return her to the Roman Catholic orphanage from which they got her because she
was too much of a bitch for them to handle) as Michelle Darnell, a
Chicago-based female finance diva
who’s a sort of combination of Martha Stewart and Suze Orman. She’s shown at
the beginning of the movie delivering a live presentation of her financial
secrets, flown in on a model phoenix (the phoenix, the legendary bird
symbolizing rebirth, is her personal talisman) in a scene that reminded Charles
of Fricka’s entrance in Die Walküre
in a chariot pulled by rams, and reminded me of Liberace’s entrance on his
final tour, in which he was flown in, Peter Pan-style, wearing a preposterous feathered costume that
made him look like a giant angel. She then proceeds to deliver a lecture
containing the usual “success” bromides, after which she returns to her office
building and demands that her long-suffering assistant Claire (Kristen Bell)
and her long-suffering chauffeur Tito (Cedric Yarborough) make sure she doesn’t
have to wait for the elevator. If you’ve seen more than three movies in your
life you’re going to be certain the spoiled diva is being set up for a major comeuppance, and said
comeuppance quickly arrives when rival financier Renault (Peter Dinklage,
Hollywood’s current go-to actor when they need a male little person, and
especially when they need a male little person villain) reports her to the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) for insider trading. Unlike Martha Stewart, who in real life
was able to take over her business empire as soon as she was released following
a brief “Club Fed” imprisonment on a similar charge, Darnell finds herself
wiped out financially since the SEC not only got her convicted but seized all
her assets and left her destitute. With nowhere else to go, she turns up on the
doorstep of her former assistant Claire, who has a nine-year-old daughter named
Rachel (Ella Anderson) and has a shit job for a woman broker with all of
Michelle’s unscrupulousness and bitchiness and none of her charm. Michelle
moves herself into Claire’s apartment and even ends up in Claire’s bed after
the folding couch she was supposed to sleep on buckles itself closed when she’s
in it and throws her across the room (a gag as old as Chaplin, but still
funny).
Naturally Michelle is looking for a way back into the financial
heights, and she discovers it when she’s dragooned into accompanying Claire and
Rachel to a meeting of Rachel’s Dandelion troop (or “troup,” as it’s misspelled
on their banner). Helen (Annie Mumolo), the adult leader of this Dandelion
troop, takes an instant dislike to Michelle and says it’s inappropriate for a
convicted felon to be at a troop meeting — the fact that Michelle’s crime had
nothing to do with kids doesn’t seem to faze her one bit — and though there’s a
sad-faced troop leader named Sandy (Kristen Schall, who proves they didn’t
break the mold after they made ZaSu Pitts), Helen and her “giantess” daughter
are clearly running the place. Driven out in humiliation, Michelle decides to
strike back. She’s got a secret weapon: a killer brownie recipe Claire makes
for Rachel. Michelle thinks that she can put the Dandelions’ (read: the Girl
Scouts’) cookie drive out of business in Chicago by having Claire make up
packages of her brownies, which she renames “Darnell’s Delights,” and
organizing the girls who are fed up with the Dandelions and want to make some
money for themselves (Michelle has pledged that her salesgirls will make a commission on their sales
which will go to help them save up for college) into a rival sales force.
There’s a great scene which seems to be a sort of nonviolent (or less violent)
version of the rumble from West Side Story in which Michelle and the Delights girls confront Helen and the
Dandelions and win — and an even more fun alternate version of this sequence
available as a bonus item on the Blu-Ray disc in which Michelle confronts a
bunch of guys headed by a big,
hunky guy named Chad (played, according to imdb.com, by professional wrestler
Dave Bautista — proving that these guys would actually be sexy if they weren’t
costumed for their wrestling performances as if they were auditioning for
Kiss), whom Michelle wallops in the nuts and then, as he’s cowering on the
ground, asks for his phone number.
To expand Darnell’s Delights into a
nationwide business Michelle seeks venture capital from her old mentor Ida
Marquette (Kathy Bates, almost unrecognizable in a shrieking platinum wig), who
helped her get her start in business and worked with Michelle until Michelle
screwed her out of a deal. Michelle uses the money to take over a commercial
kitchen in which Claire can bake the brownies, only just as the bigger
operation is getting underway she spies Claire talking to her old nemesis
Renault, and thinking Claire is about to sell her out to Renault, Michelle
beats her to the punch and sells the operation to Renault herself. Then, in a
sequence that probably had the ghost of Frank Capra smiling down from heaven
and saying, “Folks, you learned my lessons well,” Michelle has a crisis of
conscience and determines to get the company back from Renault by organizing
herself, Claire and Claire’s boyfriend Mike Beals (Tyler Labine) — a nice
bear-like schlub from Claire’s
brokerage house whom Michelle encouraged Claire to date because she felt it was
about time Claire started having sex again — to burglarize Renault’s building
(“played,” ironically enough, by the Chicago Trump Tower with Renault’s name
digitally replacing Trump’s) and steal back the one copy of the sales contract.
Of course, Michelle and Claire end up with the company back, Claire gets Mike
and Michelle gets Renault — she’s willing to forgive him everything because
he’s so good in bed — and we get a comedy that seems, despite the “sexual
content, language and brief drug use” that got the movie an “R” rating (the
“brief drug use” occurs during a flashback showing Renault and Michelle as
lovers before they became bitter enemies both in business and personally),
surprisingly old-fashioned.
No one pukes or farts in this movie — which itself
sets it above most movie “comedies” being made today — and aside from the
Capra-esque finish one could readily imagine this movie having been made in the
early 1940’s, with Preston Sturges directing, Barbara Stanwyck as Michelle,
Joan Leslie as Claire and Claire’s single-parenthood explained by having her
husband get killed in combat in World War II. (Stanwyck actually did play a Martha Stewart-type character in the 1945
film Christmas in Connecticut,
but the gag in that one is that she was a columnist presented as a
super-housewife but she really didn’t know the first thing about cooking or any
of the other domestic arts — she got the recipes from a restaurateur friend of
hers played by S. Z. Sakall and faked all the rest of it.) Surprisingly, one of
the bonus items on the Blu-Ray disc is a tape of the original improv sketch in
which Melissa McCarthy created the character of Melinda Darnell — and it’s
surprisingly lame, which is a testament to the skill of her and her husband
Falcone in developing a character who was just an avaricious bitch into one who had enough
complexities she could sustain an entire 100-minute movie. The Boss isn’t a great film, and aside from a few McCarthy
pratfalls it rarely had me laughing out loud, but I was amused throughout and
some of the gags (notably one in which as part of the burglary team Mike is
dressed as a phoenix, and the security guard turns out to be a Satanist who
energetically engages Mike in a conversation about devils and thereby is
distracted enough to let Melinda and Claire get by his station) are weird,
audacious and beautiful. (There’s also a gag about which of the three
principals — Michelle, Claire or Mike — is going to give the other security guard a blow job that’s just dumb and, as
Charles pointed out, more typical of the Gay gags that got into movies a decade
ago than what we expect in 2016.)
