Finish What You Started: Sisters

This is the first in my 2020 bi-monthly series, in which I finish watching movies I had to stop watching for whatever reason.

When I told my wife I was finally finishing Sisters, the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler vehicle we had started some three years earlier, she said “Didn’t we stop watching that because it was so terrible?”

I said, “No, I think it was just late on a Saturday night and we were tired. I don’t think it was terrible.”

As it turns out, she was right.

“Terrible” may be a strong word, but the movie does not showcase Fey and Poehler at their best, though it may showcase Fey at her sexiest, if you consider cleavage, acting wild and bits of bra poking into view to be “sexy.” I did, because I have always been attracted to Fey, but my fondness for her goes way beyond the mere physical. She is kind of the poster child for brainy women in comedy, so a role like this, in such inferior material, is unbecoming for her. But hey, even with her feminist bonafides, Fey is probably like any other human being in that she wants to remind people of her physical desirability as she hits her mid-40s. (Late 40s now, but this was five years ago.)

The bigger problem with the movie – well, there are many, but I’ll start with one. Fey and Poehler may be great friends in real life, but sisters, they do not seem to be. It’s not that they are so physically dissimilar, but just that they don’t seem like they had the same parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest, in this case). Fey plays a wild party girl and Poehler plays her goodie goodie sister. Obviously you can have “the good sibling” and “the bad sibling,” but a shrewd script and/or casting director would find things that the two had in common that made them read as siblings, even if their looks or behaviors are different. This reads as two real-life friends trying to have fun together. But not succeeding.

The premise is that the two grown daughters are facing the fact that their parents want to sell their childhood home. Both are stunted in their own way – Fey has a resentful teenage daughter and can’t hold a job, Poehler is successful but unlucky in love – so they see the selling of their home as a symbol of the ways they’ve failed. That sounds deeper than it really is, as the movie bumbles around in the doldrums of physical comedy and dirty language. What the two really want to do, apparently, is throw a final party in their old home, inviting all the other 40-somethings they went to school with, even though the new house has already been sold and the new owners are already hovering around, being obnoxiously wealthy (they paid in cash).

Can the two women throw a giant rager without destroying the home? Well, what do you think?

I have nothing but love for Fey and Poehler separately, or even together in the right context. Movies, though, are not the right context for them. I never much liked their first cinematic collaboration, Baby Mama, which again casts them against type in ways that don’t work (with Poehler the raunchy one in that context, and Fey the good one). I won’t even get into the icky ways that movie is insensitive, especially racially. Then their most recent collaboration, in which Fey plays more of a supporting role, was last year’s Wine Country, which Poehler also directed. That movie is more flat and disjointed than wrong-headed. It’s quite lethargic. (I remember from IMDB that they were both also in Mean Girls, but I don’t think their characters had any interaction.)

Sisters was written by actress/but-mostly-writer Paula Pell, who appeared in the Wine Country cast and has a small role here. (These women do like doing favors for each other, and you can throw Rachel Dratch and Maya Rudolph into this troupe of performers who appear together, as they also both appear in Wine Country and Sisters.) I kind of feel like Pell is someone with good comedic instincts. She wrote for SNL for ages and has punched up the Oscars a couple of times. But you really wouldn’t know it from here. Even a huge cast of likeable performers – including Ike Berenholtz, Bobby Moynihan, Chris Parnell, Greta Lee, John Cena and Samantha Bee – cannot scrounge up laughs from Pell’s material.

It’s not that there are zero laughs, though. I did chuckle in spite of myself on a couple occasions. Movies where parties spin out of control usually have at least a couple moments that work, that are sold simply by the talents of the performers in question. Sisters is no exception.

And so it was that I reported back to my wife that the film was “not irredeemable.” That’s not high praise though. The 1.5 stars on Letterboxd more concisely summarize this film’s value.

Okay, I’ll be back in April with another movie I started but didn’t finish.