Michelle Dean doesn't think Bridesmaids is groundbreaking:
But Annie is never presented to us as That Sort of Girl. She has no objection to the proceedings that could be even vaguely categorized as feminist. Instead, hazily, it's suggested that her problem with Lillian's wedding is simply that everyone else's life seems to be moving forward just as hers descends into disaster: she has no job and has had to move back in with her mother. And, mainly, she has no man. Jon Hamm is commitment phobic and bad in bed to boot, and Annie herself can't commit to the cute (if bland) police officer she charms out of giving her a ticket. And so we’re back to the same old thing: any ambivalence Annie feels towards the wedding is just a cipher for her fear that she will never, herself, have a guy to call her own. (It's worth noting that this romance is the only thread of Annie's disheveled life that the film resolves.)
I think it's worth distinguishing between the content of the film and the existence of the film itself. Women in the comedy world have long been smeared as, in the words of the late comedian John Belushi, "just fundamentally not funny." And if you believe his Saturday Night Live colleagues like Jane Curtin, Belushi made a commitment to sabotaging his women colleagues in an effort to prove himself prophetic. So while the characters in particular might not be particularly feminist, the film is a step forward in the sense that it proves a lingering stereotype utterly false. The movie is hilarious. There were a number of small cultural things I also appreciated about the film, for example Maya Rudolph's character is presented as mixed without any clunky dialogue providing an explanation.
What struck me about Judd Apatow's influence on the film is that the whole thing could have actually been conceived as an Apatow dude film to the point where you could imagine which male actors from Apatow's bench would replace their female counterparts. Dean laments that "the fear and anxiety in Bridesmaids springs almost solely from losing a member of your personal sisterhood to the land of men." Well, sure. Apatow's films are consistently about friendship and anxiety, particularly the way standards of masculinity make it difficult for men to express intimacy. This particular dynamic is absent from Bridesmaids because of the same gender dynamics that are operative in Apatow's other films. But plenty of Apatow's films deal with similar issues of adolescence and adulthood with male characters, and it's hard for me to see Annie's character's anxieties being exclusively about men and not also about aging and adulthood in general--she is, after all, dealing with the aftermath of a failed bakery business and even the loss of her own apartment. Her basic emotional trajectory is actually pretty similar to those of Apatow's male protagonists, who are trapped somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, struggling to muddle through, and often find themselves lured into growing up by a serious relationship. This, rather than being a feature of Bridesmaids, is part of the general vein of cultural conservatism that runs through most of Apatow's work, awkwardly masked by fart jokes.
Maybe this is part of Dean's objection, she writes that "none of the things I enjoyed about the movie were really related to the movie's appeals to "women." This was, in almost every sense of the word, a Judd Apatow film with women characters, so maybe that's not so surprising. But if the net impact of Bridesmaids' financial success is that more women like Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumolo get script writing gigs, that means that Hollywood inches closer to making the kind of film Dean wants to see.
