'Girl Most Likely' unlikely to succeed
Kristen Wiig gets stuck in a flat comedy in "Girl Most Likely" as a Manhattan reject trying to reconnect with her wacky mother.
IF KRISTEN WIIG wants to break out of the kooky lady casting rut, she picked the wrong movie in "Girl Most Likely."
The characters include a Yale graduate working in Atlantic City as a Backstreet Boy impersonator, a mollusk-loving agoraphobe who constructs a human-scale snail shell to wear in public, and a purported secret agent who drinks out of a CIA coffee mug and goes by the alias George Boushe.
The movie is stranded somewhere between sincere and silly, New York and Ocean City, N.J., and never finds a home.
Pulled in both directions is star Wiig, playing Imogene, a failed New York playwright whose mini-breakdown sends her back to the Jersey Shore to live with her estranged mother (Annette Bening), a brassy gambler whose wacky house is filled with her super-shy adult son (Christopher Fitzgerald), "secret agent" boyfriend (Matt Dillon) and a handsome boarder (Darren Criss).
Manhattan fugitive Imogene regards it all as a massive comedown, but slowly in the course of "Girl Most Likely" comes to see that the people and town she left behind (actually not Ocean City, though there are a few establishing shots) have more to offer than she cares to admit.
The movie is trying to hit a very hard comic note - something along the lines of Andrew Bergman or Paul Mazursky - but never gets the tone right. Expectations that Wiig will apply her gift for offbeat energy to resolve things are not met - in fact, her role is the blandest in the bunch, and gives her little to do but be petulant, disappointed and superior (sounds like a job for Reese Witherspoon).
For local viewers, "Girl Most Likely" will be remembered as the movie that put Bening in a Mack and Manco T-shirt.