If You Loved Barbie's Semi-Musical, Estrogen-Powered Weirdness You'll Probably Dig 2021's Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar As Well
When it was released on VOD earlier this year, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar received a lot of ecstatic praise heralding it as the next big cult comedy. It has the curious quality of being a film at once brazenly and boldly out of time, a Day-Glo 1980s fever dream of middle-aged fabulousness, and a weirdly perfect movie for a pandemic.
I’m not the only person in need of escape in the age of COVID 19 yet anxious about leaving their home. We as a society yearn to experience the escapism and carefree hedonism that has so long characterized American life that we are willing to put our health and the health of others at risk to see fucking Three Doors Down play in an indoor venue.
It’s like the Great Depression. Everybody’s lives were shit but they went to the movie theater three times a day and the choreography of Busby Berkley and the gorgeous gams of glamour girls allowed them to briefly escape the inexorable horror of their everyday lives.
On a similar note, COVID is giving everyone the stir-crazy, half-mad, quarter-apocalyptic blues so there’s never been a better time for a movie as spectacularly, transcendently silly as this.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar casts co-screenwriters and stars Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig as best friends Barb and Star respectively. They’re peas in a pod, single Nebraska women in the their forties so in sync that they sometimes seem like one silly spirit divided into two bodies.
Their lives as furniture store employees, best buds and members of a woman’s group ruled over with Mussolini-like ruthlessness by leader Debbie (Vanessa Bayer) are small, tiny even, but mostly content. They have each other and that’s all they ultimately really need.
Then the store where they work shuts down and they are unceremoniously kicked out of the women’s group for speaking an untruth and suddenly find themselves with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
So they decide to make a magical pilgrimage to a fabulously tacky hotel/resort in Vista Del Mar, Florida for some fun in the sun and end up having a wild threesome while under the influences of various mind-altering substances with hunky Edgar (50 Shades of Grey’s Jamie Dornan), a henchman in a decidedly one-sided relationship with super-villain boss Sharon Fisherman (Wiig, again, damn near unrecognizable in ghostly white make-up).
Edgar’s sole goal in life is to make his relationship with Sharon official but she is forever brushing him off, so when Star throws herself at him he succumbs to her sexual advances. This causes tension within her relationship with Barb because her best friend is just as interested in their threesome partner/drug buddy/dream man.
For a wacky comedy about unforgettably regular gals, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is surprisingly and pervasively sex-positive. It does not judge its middle-aged characters for having drunken, drugged-up group sex with someone they’ve just met and one another.
The movie doesn’t just allow Barb and Star to be sexual beings; it encourages it. Dornan made zero impression on me as the wealthy, debauched anti-hero of the 50 Shades of Grey but he reveals a Chris Hemsworth-like gift here for stealing scenes through skillful comic under-playing.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar drops a pair of poignantly banal Nebraska gals into an Austin Powers-like realm of kitschy super-villains, unnecessarily involved evil schemes for revenge and a murderous swarm of mosquitos.
The tongue-in-cheek cloak and dagger business is not as entertaining as the many scenes of Barb and Star bantering cheerfully, taking great pleasure in each other’s company. Barb and Star are a comedy duo for the ages, with the kind of built-in chemistry that can only come from knowing and working with someone for a very long time. In that respect Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is in some way a love story about the deepest, truest kind of friendship rather than romance.
Mumolo and Wiig’s long, distinguished, Oscar-nominated history together (they’re both Groundlings alum nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Bridesmaids) informs, and deepens every effortless riff and inspired ad-lib.
From the preternatural ease and comfort of their performances, it feels like Mumolo and Wiig could happily improvise in character for years, even decades. Heck, they seem to love Barb and Star so much that they could be them for extended periods of time.
There is a lot of wacky randomness in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, including the villain training mice to perform dramatic musical cues and a Morgan Freeman cameo unlike any before or since. There are also a surprising number of musical numbers. This is a breezy, dizzy semi-musical where characters sometimes break out spontaneously in song and dance.
But for all of its exquisite silliness Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is fundamentally about characters and relationships. There’s tremendous depth and pathos to Barb and Star. They’re real and alive in a way the protagonists of wacky comedies seldom are.
It would be easy for this to come off as smug, ironic and distasteful, the snarky work of Los Angeles hipsters laughing at the rubes in flyover county and their tacky fantasies but the film has such boundless affection for its lead characters and its milieu that it’s damn near impossible not to love them as well.
It’s not quite the Gathering of the Juggalos but finally catching with one of the year’s most beloved cult movies provided me with a much-needed sense of escape to a child-like world of friendship, adventure and wonder.
That’s just what I needed. So if you similarly need a pick-me-up or want to take a vacation without leaving your home I heartily recommend this instant cult classic.
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