Something to smile about with Melissa McCarthy around
Melissa McCarthy is trying to keep comedy alive at a moment when Hollywood — and its audience — can’t seem to crack a smile, writes
Originally, we were scheduled to go to a rage room, which, I think, is a place where you can beat things to death in a disturbing, passive-aggressive cry for help.
Neither of us had ever been to one, but honestly, by the time it was suggested to me, it sounded like the cure of and for the century. I’ll probably never know.
The local rage room was open for only 15 minutes on a Thursday, which we all found strange because, considering the state of the world, a rage room should maybe be open around the clock as a public service. (“You need to have them like Starbucks,” McCarthy told me later.)
Her publicist tried, but ultimately the rage room wouldn’t open early, not even for Melissa McCarthy, and she called to tell me that we would be changing to indoor skydiving at the iFly at Universal Studios.
“I hope you see the metaphor here,” her publicist said to me. “She’s flying, she’s up high, she’s soaring.” I nodded and dutifully wrote this down.
McCarthy arrived. She’s tiny, just 5-foot-2, and her face is a shiny, magnetic sparkle — its resting expression is cheerfulness, its cheeks are dimpled, its inquisitiveness is somehow loving.
She is prone to wide-eyed expressions of surprise; she is prone to making her mouth as round as her eyes as she listens in awe or surprise or delight.
It’s a staple of some of her Midwestern-seeming characters, a delighted incredulity when faced with the modern world.
McCarthy was excited. I tried to be, too, but truthfully, I was still kind of bummed. A rage room! I could really find my way through a rage metaphor right now.
I asked her why she wanted to do it in the first place. Was she as angry as the rest of us? She said it sounded fun. I asked her how she chose indoor sky diving as a runner-up.
Was she ready to jet off and leave this earth and colonize another planet and start over like the rest of us? No, she said. The rage room was closed and this also sounded fun. I blinked.
I sat on deck, watching her take her turn. It had been a long time since I’d participated in an overt magazine stunt whose purpose was to set a scene for the opening paragraph of a story, to crystallize and illuminate a person for the reader and create a metaphor through which to weave a story — it’s just not done anymore.
I looked from my notebook to the tube to my notebook to the tube, and yeah, I guess she was flying, she was up high, she was soaring.
Then I noticed her face beneath her helmet: Her mouth and eyes open as round as her dimples, her face an expression of unmitigated wonder and joy, and there beyond the glass, I noticed for the first time just what a good time she seemed to be having.
This winter, McCarthy, 48, sat in a dirty Midtown apartment in Manhattan, thinking about the good old days.
The day’s set was an apartment decorated to look like the journalist/forger Lee Israel’s 1980s Upper West Side apartment, for her new movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
The shoot took place during the same era when McCarthy lived in New York as a young woman, back when New York was gross and not as polished and filled with finance bros (which is its own kind of gross) and perfect. Was that what was making her feel so nostalgic?
It was the ‘80s or maybe it was Lee Israel herself. Israel wrote biographies about celebrities but couldn’t support herself, so she began forging letters in the voices of celebrities, a kind of fan fiction that allowed her work to finally be something it never was, which was valued. McCarthy was drawn to a character so different from herself: “Talk about conflicted and challenging,” she said.
Talk about someone who is not trying to be likeable at all.
McCarthy knew the movie, which was written by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty and directed by Marielle Heller, had promise to be great, and early reviews suggest that she was right. Already, she has been called “caustic, profane, curmudgeonly, affecting and very funny” (NPR), “nothing short of miraculous” (Big Apple Reviews), in her “best performance to date” (Variety), “the ideal template for McCarthy to project her talents onto a more sophisticated plane” (IndieWire).
If aliens landed and you wanted them to understand the toll of the recent years on the American psyche, you could easily do so by explaining that in 2018, the same comic supernova who gave us Spy and Heat and Megan from Bridesmaids and Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live was making a serious drama, just her second starring dramatic role since 2014’s St. Vincent.
She wouldn’t like the implications of this, though. She doesn’t understand why people think funny people aren’t allowed to also do drama. And yes, that’s fair, but also: The big autumn movie from the most bankable comic star on this planet is a drama that will leave you in tears.
Has anyone ever worked so hard to make us laugh as Melissa McCarthy? Has anyone ever subverted her appearance — wholesome, smiley, Midwestern — as well as her S.N.L. Coach Kelly, throwing an actual toaster at a basketball player?
Has anyone ever so undermined conventional gender expectations more than McCarthy cornering the air marshal played by her husband Ben Falcone on the flight in Bridesmaids, asking him if he wanted to get back into that restroom and “not rest,” her teeth over her bottom lip, her entire body making a strangely chill humping motion?
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is her third movie this year. The others, Life of the Party and The Happytime Murders, were comedies and were not quite so adored.
She read those reviews, too. She sees that when a drama doesn’t work, it was “a good effort” and gets a thoughtful review, but when a comedy doesn’t work, it’s a crime against humanity and gets taken outside behind the shed. And shot. And then burned.
Critics never loved comedies, not even in her most beloved era, the ‘80s, but those movies could still get audiences; those movies could still be financed. Now audiences have access to Rotten Tomatoes ratings and every single review from every single paper; it is hard to come back from overwhelmingly negative critical consensus.
Put it this way: Twenty years ago, there were three pure comedies in the Top 10 highest-grossing movies of the year. This year, so far, there are zero.
She worries about comedy. In 2013, she and Falcone, created their production company, On the Day Productions, which allows them to make their movies on their terms, with their own comic tastes. They keep their costs down, making movies like Life of the Party and The Boss and next year’s Superintelligence in Atlanta for an audience they know still exists.
They keep their sets closed and tight and full of only people they know and trust. Some people call their movies failures because they’re not critically beloved, but they mostly break even during their opening weekends.
They still make millions and millions of dollars — and keep her among Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses — and offer a 90-minute refuge for a whole lot of people, so exactly which part of it is a failure?
“We’re in a lot of trouble if it all becomes cops and capes and horror and grim,” she said. At night, she and Falcone, who directed Life of the Party, Tammy and The Boss, sit in what they call their old-people chairs with glasses of Scotch and talk about whether comedy can be saved.
Falcone worries that the world and the movies the world wants to see are getting darker and darker and darker because the spectrum of human awareness has widened and the mood has dampened and we’ve taken the movies down with us.
Last October, I visited her in Atlanta on the set of Life of the Party, which was cozy and loose, like one of those Sunday-night dinners McCarthy and Falcone host. Life of the Party is wholesome McCarthy — a joyful, mostly bewildered middle-aged McCarthy character who returns to school after her husband dumps her.
This is the kind of movie they love: no political implications, relevant only in the way it tickles them when they think of some of the lines and stunts and characters.
The sets, particularly the ones on which Falcone is directing, look the same again and again because they’re populated by people who have known one another, some of them as far back as the Groundlings. On this one: Matt Walsh, who was also in “Ghostbusters” with McCarthy, now playing her husband.
Mallory, who wrote The Boss and appeared in Tammy and Identity Thief and whom McCarthy and Falcone had invited as a guest writer to sharpen the day’s dialogue. Damon Jones, who also appeared in both of those movies. Maya Rudolph, who has been in just about everything with her.
When she was training at the Groundlings, she was taught the improv rules, to say “Yes and” and “Why not?” ad infinitum until you land at the most extreme and funniest state of play.
The freedom and comfort allows her to strip away the natural human vanity that undermines comedy as she tries out new lines and bombs incessantly. “Vanity,” she told me, “is a huge waste of time and you never get good work that way.”
Magic happens when you bomb so much.
She learned that in the Groundlings, too. “You try 20 to get one.” It allows her to be ornery and vulnerable in The Heat. It allows her to be cantankerous and lost in Tammy.
It allows her to be bombastic and desperate in The Boss. The few rules on set are strict ones.
The main one is: be present, which translates into people only using their phones for direct, necessary communication. She sees why phones are needed, she accepts their existence, but she thinks the world got much worse and more apathetic and less willing to say “Yes and” and “Why not?” the minute everyone had a smartphone.
Before she was allowed to stay up late on Saturday nights, growing up on a corn-and-soybean farm in Plainfield, Ill., she would sneak down the stairs of her childhood home and hide near the TV room where her parents couldn’t see her and watch Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live.
She watched ‘80s movies: Michael Dorsey’s bid for a career in Tootsie, the Delta Tau Chi’s quest to stay on campus in Animal House, Chevy Chase trying to get his family to Wally World in Vacation. But Radner was one of her idols. Radner had it all — a wild physicality and a deep emotional intelligence, a fearlessness.
McCarthy wanted to be wild, too. She was always trying characters on. She was a cheerleader one year, the next a Goth with black lipstick and bangs who wouldn’t talk to anyone. She went to Catholic school for 12 years and wore a uniform but would say, “Knee down and neck up is mine.”
She had friends. She was on the student council. She played tennis. But then she would dye her hair blue-black and wear Kabuki makeup and full-length capes. That wasn’t teenage moodiness. There was no real darkness behind it. What can she say? She lived in a small town. She was bored.
People don’t really get her. They want to know her philosophy, her feelings on irony, how she does it. Falcone told me that everyone always wants to know what big secret she’s keeping. “I think people, in the effort to keep things poppy, don’t look and see that while she’s incredibly kind and Midwestern and gentle, she’s also really complicated as a human, as we all are,” Falcone told me.
I think what people are missing is the fact that she’s pretty, she’s funny, she’s smart... She’s told all the time, ‘You can’t do this or that in the acting world.’ But she says, ‘Why not’ and ‘Yes and’ all the time, which I think is a hallmark of crazy people but also people that are successful.
Critics say her comedies are just sanitized versions of a time she’s nostalgic for. But the thing that keeps her making the kind of movies she and Falcone make isn’t nostalgia. It’s just that that’s just the last time comedy was allowed to be a random assortment of things to make you laugh. It’s her refusal to let the state of the world come and take comedy along with it.
After Bridesmaids, the media called her an overnight success, even though she was past 40 and had, by that time, “worked like an animal” for decades. All these years and all this hard work and she finally got to Wally World. But what happens when you get to Wally World and you find out it’s closed?
In their chairs, Falcone says maybe we’re already too lost. McCarthy says, “Yeah, but what if?” Comedy changes. Comedy has changed. McCarthy has created her own world time and again — at home and on set and in her childhood. And yes, bubbles don’t just keep things in; they keep things out, too.
They keep out input and challenges, and sometimes they even keep out change. But what if it’s valid to not want to change? What if it’s valid to keep misery at bay?
I wrote this story six times, and each time it was returned to me as too depressing and listless.
I tried to figure out how to make it work — a Melissa McCarthy article should probably not be depressing, I agreed — and my editor gave me some suggestions, but I couldn’t hear him above the TVs in our newsroom, which all blared detailed accounts of sexual assault and miscarriages of justice.
What I’m saying is that maybe McCarthy is onto something. She’s funny. That’s it. That’s what she aspires to. Take it or leave it, but please don’t leave it because it has taken me this long to recognize it and that’s not great. What I’m saying is that maybe we should consider trying this her way.
So: McCarthy was flying, she was way up high, she was soaring.
She was hovering six feet above Los Angeles, her body and soul and her essence and her gifts protected by a glass tube (was the glass tube the point this whole time?), wearing a purple jumpsuit made out of some environment-defiant mixture of nylon and other proprietary materials and a helmet and goggles.
Her limbs were spread out like a starfish, with her legs bent at the knee as if she were a teenager reading on her stomach on her bed and her arms bent at the elbow so that had she been upright, they would have made the shape of a cactus.
Six feet is not so far up, but it is far enough away from us to see us but not catch our ills of gloom and despondence.
During her last turn, the wind was kicked up and she was sent way, way up, to the top of the tube, so that she was even higher and had even more distance. I looked at her face, with its wonder.
There she was — her mouth and eyes were round like her dimples in an expression of unmitigated wonder and joy. There she was, up in the air, high above everyone, yelling to me that I just had to try it.
Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine
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