![]() “I worried, are people gonna laugh at certain parts of this ‘cause they’re used to seeing me do things that are comedic? … I never saw it as funny … This poor girl, she’s kissing herself that’s so sad. “I’m so surprised that comes across as funny,” Wiig told The Los Angeles Times. In one scene, which prompted the laughter from the audience, Wiig’s character practises kissing for the first time by sloppily tonguing her own reflection in a mirror. The 2013 indie is a peculiar movie, with Wiig playing a timid caregiver tricked by two teenage girls into believing a man is in love with her. She’s aware of it, too, once recalling watching her film Hateship Loveship with a festival audience, and hearing them laugh at a scene she thought was completely unfunny. ![]() ![]() Wiig’s inherent melancholy hasn’t been spoken about a great deal, potentially because she’s regarded more as an amusing and silly presence in things, even when she isn’t trying to be. Both films, along with Bridesmaids, capture a specific strain of thirtysomething malaise, where all the fearless showboating of your early twenties has been eroded, and a curious mix of dissatisfaction and regret has taken its place. In the masterful The Skeleton Twins (2014), she was a suicidal dental hygienist who only came alive when she was allowed to regress – whether by dressing up in a Halloween costume like she’s 13 again, or having a series of passionless affairs with authority figures. In Girl Most Likely (2012), she was a blocked playwright whose early industry buzz had evaporated. In the 10 years separating Bridesmaids and next year’s Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, which reunites Wiig and Mumolo as stars and co-writers, Wiig mined similar emotional territory as an actor. “Her characters are always smiling on the outside and dying on the inside,” Wiig’s Bridesmaids director, Paul Feig, once said of her. For as long as she’s been working, Wiig has seemed drawn to the tonally uncertain, or projects that match her onscreen ambiguity. Yet none of this unspoken tension is surprising. She carries with her the weight of being overlooked all her life, the overeagerness around hoped-for friends, the private self-loathing. She is spooky and threatening, but also bruised and vulnerable. And while the film ends up making her feline alter ego, Cheetah, very much the B-villain to Pedro Pascal’s Trumpian megalomaniac, Wiig is brilliant. She grows in confidence, develops supernatural abilities and loses her dowdy ensembles – at one point, because this is the Eighties and no cultural signifier is left untouched, she visits a gym dressed like an extra in an Olivia Newton-John video. Through the intervention of a magical thingamajig that grants wishes, Barbara blossoms. Wonder Woman 1984 is a piece of hopeful, uncynical filmmaking.Wiig’s performances are neither cynical stabs at Oscar glory, nor an antidote to years of comic slumming instead, sad clownery is at the root of almost everything she does. Jagged angles in her acting pierce through the lightest of her movies, upending the traditional narratives assigned to the famous and funny when they take on more overtly dramatic roles. She is a comedian but not a stand-up: hilarious but also capable of breaking your heart with a depressed glance. Wiig, who rose to fame on the US sketch show Saturday Night Live, defies easy categorisation. Truthfully, Wiig has spent a decade in film playing the melancholy, the disappointed and the cripplingly unhappy. The film serves as a radical departure for the Bridesmaids star, but only if you haven’t been paying attention. In Wonder Woman 1984, Kristen Wiig plays a woman so consumed by feelings of loneliness and self-doubt that she willingly becomes a mutant supervillain to escape them.
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