Movie review in the Friday, April 16 Oregonian....
"Connie and Carla" may be fairly funny, sort of sweet and slightly muddled, but there's one thing about which it is utterly certain:
It loves, loves, loves it some bad cabaret.
Writer/star Nia Vardalos' follow-up to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" stars her and Toni Collette as Chicago dinner-theater wannabes on the run from a mobster. They disguise themselves as drag queens -- and end up headlining a hit drag revue in West Hollywood. Which means the movie is positively awash in vampy, campy song-and-dance numbers -- often shown in their entirety -- from such musical chestnuts as "Cats," "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "South Pacific." You see, Connie and Carla's enthusiastic assaults on well-worn stage tunes are welcomed as high camp by audiences of gay men -- a notion that is in no way being run into the ground by pretty much every episode of "Will & Grace."
Still, it's a funny idea -- an unofficial remake of "Some Like It Hot" with a sort of "Victoria/Victor/Victoria" twist -- and Vardalos and Collette have a terrific chemistry. They're like townie song-and-dance versions of Romy and Michele. And -- how to put this? -- they have great faces for drag; Collette in particular has a hilariously deadpan pout as she vamps onstage in thick eye makeup. The best parts of the movie are in the opening, when they're yowling on the run and smacking each other around in a car; you can tell the actresses are just having a ball.
Things get sappier, however, when we're introduced to the drag queens who eventually become Connie and Carla's backup singers. There's this whole subplot with a sensitive queen (Stephen Spinella) who's trying to reconcile with his brother (David Duchovny) that traffics in TV-movie narrative beats: Duchovny's uncomfortable with men wearing dresses! His girlfriend's a bigot! Cue tinkly piano cues! Reconcile and repeat!
In fact, if the movie has a problem, it's that it sort of wallows in good intentions as it tries to make drag queens palatable for suburbia. The scenes where Connie and Carla lecture us about unhealthy body image are well-meaning, but they also bring to mind the immortal words of the aliens scolding Woody Allen in "Stardust Memories": "You want to do mankind a service? Tell funnier jokes!" The movie's far funnier, more humane, and quietly getting its message across during the scene where a drunk Vardalos, in drag and adopting a killer falsetto, flirts with a drunk Duchovny, who doesn't know she really is a woman.
It's a tricky balancing act, and the movie falls off its tightrope a few times. As a writer, Vardalos doesn't quite nail Connie and Carla: Are these women ditzy white trash, campy gay groupies, or clever performers with great voices? And the "wacky" climax, where villains are waiting in the wings while our heroes perform onstage? Yeah, that was played in Donny and Marie's "Goin' Coconuts."
Still, as long as you don't analyze its deeper implications too deeply, its heart's in the right place; there's the same sort of essential sweetness to the proceedings that made "Greek Wedding" such a huge hit.
That said, if you do analyze its deeper implications too deeply, troubling questions arise. Must we always have straight "tour guides" whenever a Hollywood movie explores a gay subculture? What is the movie telling us by suggesting that gay people, as a faceless voting bloc, enjoy badly performed showtunes? Why do the inept-but-straight Connie and Carla get to school the inept-but-gay drag queens, who are clearly their moral and intellectual superiors? And does Debbie Reynolds, who shows up toward the end, sleep in some sort of hyperbaric suspended-animation chamber?
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(97 minutes; rated PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual humor and drug references) B-minus
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