I’ve seen Kristen Wiig’s work on Saturday Night Live, Bridesmaids and The Skeleton Twins. Girl Most Likely is about to expire on Amazon Instant Video as a Prime movie so I randomly decided to have a Kristen Wiig marathon because I noticed that I have a ton of her movies in my queue.
Girl Most Likely tries harder to remain light and happy, but is closer to The Skeleton Twins than Bridesmaids in spirit. Girl Most Likely is about a woman who loses her long-term relationship and her day job and is about to lose her apartment. She feels like she was full of potential, but squandered it on trying to belong to a Manhattan dream world like Oz instead of her awful, dreary Kansas, New Jersey. Naturally she decides to fake a suicide attempt to get her boyfriend back. Ha ha ha…oh wait, no, none of this is objectively funny, but Girl Most Likely works because of Wiig and the talented cast.
Wiig manages to do her favorite thing-play a reasonably sardonic, smart, superficially reserved and likable but slightly mentally disturbed, desperate, shamelessly reckless, particularly sexual, human being. She plays these characters so frequently that I’m beginning to wonder how close these characters resemble the real Wiig. Wiig’s characters are always more realistic than most film characters, which makes them more relatable and the situations they find themselves in more uncomfortable and realistically devastating than the usual comedy. This realism helped me tolerate the things that are obviously Girl Most Likely’s contrivances to create tidy and fantastic solutions that no one finds in real life.
Girl Most Likely isn’t just Wiig’s show. Girl Most Likely features Annette Benning in a role usually taken by Susan Sarandon, the inappropriate, openly sexual and irresponsible mother. Christopher Fitzgerald does an excellent job as Wiig’s older brother who is disabled, but is never treated like the butt of any joke. June Diane Raphael plays an extremely privileged fake friend who while being wrong also has healthy boundaries. Darren Criss from Glee (Kurt’s boyfriend) walks a tricky tightrope as the annoying tenant who eventually befriends Wiig’s character. While Girl Most Likely walks very close to the line of NJ economic low class stereotypes, talented actors such as Natasha Lyonne find a way to imbue an emotional realism that pulls it back from being offensive or alienating and instead succeed in making it feel like a tender homage.
Girl Most Likely may not be for everyone. Girl Most Likely veers so wildly from devastating realism to broad comedy that the thin suspension of disbelief may snap in half, but if you like Wiig, I think that you will enjoy it.