In the wake of Tammy’s arrival in theaters, a number of reasonable entertainment columnists have offered think pieces packed with concern about the career path of Melissa McCarthy, the comic actress who has parlayed a breakout role in Bridesmaids (2011) with a number of hit-and-miss comedies playing variations on the same character. One piece even went so far as to wonder out loud how McCarthy can find a way to achieve the same career as Adam Sandler. I think that writer missed the real problem: With Tammy, McCarthy has become Adam Sandler. The better question, then, is: Can she avoid that fate?
In Tammy McCarthy plays a boorish slob who has a very bad day: Her aging Toyota is totaled after a run-in with a deer; she’s fired from her fast-food job, which might seem unfair until we see her reaction to the news; and then she comes home to find her husband (Nat Faxon) cheating on her with a neighbor (Toni Collette). At this last part I began to wonder what’s up, because the film wants us to think ADULTERY! when the tableau witnessed by Tammy is … two people eating a meal at the dining room table. Neither the script nor the action indicates anything more than that has progressed, and yet suddenly Tammy is upstairs packing her bags. Absurdist humor can be fun, but shouldn’t the audience allowed to be in on the joke?
Tammy goes to the home of her mom (Allison Janney) and bypasses maternal comfort in favor of grabbing the bankroll and the car keys belonging to her grandma (Susan Sarandon); then she and her mother’s mother decide to take a trip for no particular reason. (Everything in this film happens for no particular reason.) The road-movie hijinks that ensue – a ruined jet-ski, sex with strangers, Grandma getting drunk, an awkward robbery – probably all seemed funnier on paper than they turn out to be in execution.
No matter how you feel about Tammy, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that McCarthy owns at least some of the responsibility for that reaction. She produced the film and co-wrote it with her husband, the little-known actor Ben Falcone; then Falcone, who’s never directed a movie before, somehow wound up with that job as well. (It pays to know people, I guess.) His inexperience shows, as the film bears the running time of a sprightly comedy and yet feels like the longest 97 minutes of the summer. There’s no internal logic to the length of individual scenes; at times I wondered if the director got distracted by a killer Words With Friends game and forgot to tell the camera operators to stop rolling.
Watching the film, all that creative sloppiness – the wasted opportunities, the squandered talent, the handpicked director – reminded me of an Adam Sandler movie. Sandler, like McCarthy, has a nimble mind and organic comic timing, but you wouldn’t know it from his films. And for years Sandler has held tight control over his lowest-common-denominator movie empire – possibly out of the fear that if he allowed his fate to be put in someone else’s hands, he might be forced to work harder to achieve greater things with his talents. It’s still too early to see if McCarthy is determined to follow that same path, or if Tammy (along with last year’s wan Identity Thief) is just an aberration. Fingers crossed.
(IMAGE: Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon in Tammy; photo courtesy of Warner Bros.)