A Toast to ‘Bridesmaids’ and Beautifully Messy Bridal Parties
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Vicki Rakowski
I’m trying to think if there is a stranger part of the female friendship experience than being a bridesmaid. Maybe there is, and I just haven’t experienced it yet, but I’ll go ahead and make this bold declaration: being a bridesmaid is one of the weirdest experiences you can go through in tribute to your friendship with the bride.
When the movie Bridesmaids came out, starring Kristin Wiig and Maya Rudolph (amongst many other brilliant actors), I was predisposed to like it. Hollywood loves to forget that women actually like movies and want to see women’s stories told by smart, creative people, so Bridesmaids was making waves. I can still remember letting the pleasure of this movie roll over me as I sat watching it in the packed theater on opening weekend.
In one of the earliest scenes of the movie, Annie (Wiig) and Lillian (Rudolph) are eating breakfast together, and I felt a pleasing flicker of familiarity in the intimacy of friends who’ve known each other for so long. When Lillian announces her engagement to Annie, the joy, melancholy, envy, and fear that Annie experiences within a 90-second span felt instantly understandable to me. A few scenes later, the wedding train is officially pulling out of the station, with Lillian introducing Annie to her other bridesmaids at the engagement party, and the harrowing twists and turns of the maid-of-honor journey have started in earnest.
Near and Dear and Weird
If you have never been a bridesmaid, how do I explain this to you?
Other than my child, female friendship is probably the thing I am most grateful for in my life. My girlfriends have been my strength, my joy, my connection. We have been the witnesses to each other's lives. Sometimes I have felt that they are the people in the world who understand me best, and I would walk through fire for them. If you have this kind of friendship in your life, you are lucky. If you do not have it, I wish it for you very much.
That said, at times, supporting them and helping with some of their weddings, there were moments when I could have easily wrung somebody’s neck. Theirs, or one of their other bridesmaids.
I don’t know what it is about weddings that brings this out in the bridal party. If I had to guess, I would say it’s a few different things: the absolutely overwhelming experience of preparing to marry somebody in a ceremony that takes place in front of a bunch of people, the unspoken jockeying that shows how close one is to the bride, the differences of opinion on what things should cost, the weird events and rituals that lead up to the wedding itself and how each is an opportunity for people who love each other to take out their stress on each other.
I don’t care how mentally healthy and well-adjusted the bridal party is. All bridal parties contain some of those elements, dialed up to some level of intensity, whether that’s a whisper or a screeching howl. And it is everybody’s job to get through it and out on the other side somehow.
Why does this happen? I honestly don’t know, but it’s a thing. And I know other people see it and recognize it because of the brilliance of Bridesmaids.
Bouquets and the Best Beautiful Mess
The best, most loving support I’ve ever known in my life is that of other women. Friends are the witnesses to our lives, and something about weddings just brings up a person’s messy, lovely, quirky, and full humanity. The hijinx that ensue might be best described as the perfect storm of multiple expectations meeting multiple realities. Bridesmaids is a tribute to that storm and all its potential.
The thing that feels so good about friendship are those pings of recognition when you’re interacting with somebody—you see me, you know me, you get me. I experienced those pings in nearly every scene of the movie. By the time Megan (Melissa McCarthy) shows up on screen and performs her first bizarre monologue about being saved by a dolphin when she fell off a cruise ship, I was choking with laughter and deeply enchanted with the movie. (A detail that feels critical to share: Melissa McCarthy reportedly based aspects of her performance and costuming in this movie off of Guy Fieri. I can’t think of many more brilliant artistic choices, and I’ll take whatever opportunity I can to celebrate it.)
But it was when Helen (Rose Byrne), Annie’s bridal party rival, enters the chat that I really got what this movie was trying to do.
“Something about weddings just brings up a person’s messy, lovely, quirky, and full humanity.”
When you select a friend as your maid of honor, it’s because she is best/most to you, and you are showing the world by having her stand next to you and hold your bouquet. It is such a simple, tiny thing to the outside world. But if you have been there, you know. You know what that primacy means: we see each other, we know each other, we get each other the very most. To the rest of the world, it just looks like a bouquet. Maybe that’s why the experience is so strange. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but somehow it is very important that you are holding that bouquet because of everything it took to be standing in that spot.
I have been friends with my two best gals since I was 12 and 15, respectively. We had periods where we didn’t speak, periods where we spoke constantly. I admire them deeply, worry for them, root for them, and laugh with them. I feel the faint shadow of their importance in my life at all times. I don’t get to see them as much as I want (thanks, life, children, and work), but their existence and presence in my life feels like a tether to reality. How lucky I am to know these women.
And how lucky that we can see the less exalted aspects of each other’s personalities and say, “Yeah, I love her anyway.”
It’s there, in Bridesmaids. A movie full of brilliant physical comedy, jokes, and personalities, which hide some of the complex truths of witnessing each other’s lives: I see you, I know you, I get you in all your beautiful mess. I’ll hold your bouquet, then let’s go dance.
Vicki Rakowski is an enthusiastic consumer of all things art and literature, and a library director in the Chicagoland area.