Girl Most Likely

An immensely likeable cast gets pushed to breaking point and beyond in Girl Most Likely, a Kristen Wiig quasi-romcom that is preposterous and obnoxious in turn. The tale of a playwright called Imogene (Wiig) who starts over by returning to her New Jersey home and to Zelda, her former go-go dancer of a mum (an unplayable role here foisted upon the great Annette Bening, if you please), the film wants to be distinctively quirky and merely ends by shutting the audience out.

Nor would detail seem to be its strong suit if the dénouement is to be believed. By film's end, Imogene is shown savouring the triumph of a play premiere at the Joyce Theatre in New York's Chelsea, a venue that in my experience has been given over exclusively to dance. 

Still, why quibble, Sibyl, as Noël Coward asked in an entirely different context? I'll offer up a reason: because Michelle Morgan's script wastes such a deft array of actors, who aren't much helped by co-directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman either. On the one hand, we're meant to be charmed by this gathering of eccentrics, headed by Bening (pictured above), whose accent slides every which way along the social scale like some wayward commuter train. Aren't whacked-out mums a hoot, we're meant to think, even though Imogene can't take more than five minutes in Zelda's company? (The two are equally unbearable if you ask me.) Zelda even comes with a glowering lover in the form of Matt Dillon, a CIA employee who calls himself George Bosche (oy) and claims to have been struck by lightning three times. Huh?  

A prospect of sanity for the meltdown-prone Imogene exists in the doe-eyed, randomly Francophilic form of Glee star Darren Criss, playing a sometime-singer called Lee who lodges with Zelda but falls for her daughter. A onetime Yalie, Lee gets the significantly older Imogene drunk and - voilà! - romance blossoms, which in turn leads the newfound lovebirds (pictured below during a less cheerful moment) to Manhattan and the tony Sutton Place apartment of Imogene's father (Bob Balaban), who turns out not only not to be dead but to be living in improbable grandeur. How this character ended up in this home might rankle rather more had the film by that point not abandoned all common sense. (A ghastly fantasy sequence involving Imogene's night of triumph at Broadway's Tony Awards is beneath-contempt tacky.)  

The very opening, showing Imogene's petulant, pre-pubescent self, suggests a film that may go on to offer a welcome comic critique of a certain form of American self-assertion, only then for the narrative to dump all over Imogene, thereby demanding sympathy for a heroine who hasn't begun to earn it. And by the time she and Lee are parrying the cut-and-thrust of eyebrows consistently raised at the discrepancy in their years, you're unlikely to care. That portion of the film has some while before surrendered to the very self-delusion that Girl Most Likely at the outset seems to want to puncture. This is that rare movie whose plot itself is perfectly clear and that moment by moment - not to mention in its entirety - makes not a jot of sense. 

Watch a clip from Girl Most Likely overleaf