There’s a little war going on inside the frames of Tammy, the latest comedy starring Melissa McCarthy. She’s an incredibly talented actress and comedian with whom Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do. She yells very well, so they tend to give her roles that showcase violent behavior and abusive dialogue. She usually gets away with it. McCarthy is such a humane performer that even when she plays a sadistic monster in Identity Thief, a little bit of goodness still shines through.
So Tammy, co-written by McCarthy herself, takes an approach that probably shouldn’t seem novel but sadly does: it simply lets her be good. The title character is socially awkward, sometimes even brash and abrasive, but she’s the victim of circumstance no matter how poorly she reacts to life’s little foibles. Tammy doesn’t create most of her problems, she just responds poorly to them. She’s a woman who is willing to sleep outside a motel room door and let raccoons nip at her, just because her alcoholic grandmother is having sex inside, and Tammy’s afraid the lady will run off if there’s no one to block the exit.
This bittersweet attitude would have been enough to make Tammy a sensitive and likable comedy about family, road trips and growing up (all those clichés), but dang it, it’s a summer movie, and concessions have to be made so concessions can be sold in the lobby. For all of its Alexander Payne-lite familial melodrama and endearing outsider charms, McCarthy and her director / co-writer Ben Falcone (also McCarthy’s husband) still felt the need to toss in a few “wacky” physical comedy routines with jet skis and soiled hamburgers. This contrast between a genuinely good, albeit hardly groundbreaking comedy and a contrived popcorn-pushing yuckfest makes the film seem more than a little scatterbrained.
For a while, at least. After an overly frantic first act in which Tammy loses her job at a fast food restaurant, loses her husband to a next-door neighbor and hits the road with her grandmother, played by a refreshingly energized Susan Sarandon, Tammy eventually settles into its more low-key and involving identity. McCarthy and Sarandon are very funny together and eke some real tenderness out of their quieter moments, and the supporting cast of genuinely supportive women – including Kathy Bates, Allison Janney, Sandra Oh and Sarah Baker – are all given scenes of individuality and whimsy.
It seems like McCarthy and Falcone actually like writing characters with amusing points of view who interact with each other in an entertaining and honest way. I’m not sure why the silly incident with the boating equipment was even deemed necessary, or why McCarthy was forced to dance to Macklemore with a paper bag over her head. I presume the filmmakers simply needed something that would look good in a trailer and attract the mainstream Will Ferrell crowd. But that’s not Tammy, and that’s not Tammy, a film that apparently got lost on the way to Sundance and is now a little too eager to hide its true nature within a marketplace that typically rewards inane insincerity more endearing thoughtfulness.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
