By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–The very fact that writer and star Kristen Wiig, along with director Paul Feig, likely did not think about it makes their hit comedy Bridesmaids a resounding social statement. The friendships, romantic entanglements, jealousies, and hilarities have to do with everything but one old stand-by: racial stereotypes.
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In this truly entertaining and refreshing comedy, driven by women’s esprit and a female abandon too often restrained in contemporary cinema, yet not of the necessarily hopeless conceit of the iconic Thelma and Louise, color is invisible. The two principal friends are silly together, wistful, gross, angry, forgiving, sexual, and flawed. Their narrative reveals a truly extended and shared set of memories.
The fact that one is white and one is not is completely irrelevant; we see Kristen Wiig’s Annie and Maya Rudolph’s Lillian as two contemporary women—their bonds and secrets and mistakes transcend any racial agenda. This simply would not have been the case not so long ago—emanating from neither the writers’ imagination nor the audience’s tolerance.
The movie believes in humor, not in hue. Watching it (and bellowing) with my eighteen-year old stepdaughter, my spirits were lifted and I felt a certain sense of triumph. The black bride was marrying a white boy and this was utterly a non-issue in the story. Rudolph portrays the offspring of an interracial union—just as she herself is the daughter of the late and remarkable soul singer Minnie Riperton and the Ashkenazi Jewish songwriter Richard Rudolph. The intertwining ethnic bloodlines of the main characters are seamlessly extraneous in this culturally exultant motion picture
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There was nothing to discuss with my stepdaughter after the movie but its merriment and quality. Unlike what my group knew as teenagers in the churning ‘60s, the societal mixing of people and generations, the inclusive thrust of the script, made me simply feel grateful to have lived long enough for my kids to have become colorblind.
Dr. King may have been offended by some of the toilet humor, but he would have smiled to himself about how much has been flushed away in just a generation or so.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com