[REVIEW: In Theaters] GIRL MOST LIKELY (6/10)

Girl Most Likely (which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival as Imogene) is a near miss of a film – on one hand you get a hilariously neurotic performance by Kristen Wiig (hilarious neurotic could be her middle name) as the (former) title character Imogene – and Annette Bening as her mom with a gambling (and perhaps sex) addiction. By all means this should be a winning combo but something about it just doesn’t quite come together – comedy is made often in editing (as any film is, really), and here things seem structurally off.

Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (Pulcini is also the film’s editor), it’s slightly out of touch – Wiig plays a failed New York playwright who is granted admission into an exclusive uptown world via a playwriting grant (and she fails to produce work for it), when her life is turned upside down she resorts to suicide. An over crowding problem at the hospital forces Imogene into the care of Zelder (her mom), who lives down the shore outside of Atlantic City with a CIA operative known as George Bousche (Matt Dillon). Christopher Fitzgerald plays Ralph, the geeky brother (also living at home) – who builds a human replica of an exoskeleton.

The film captures two paces of life without the interest to really explore just how hard Imogene has fallen: it’s a shame, I think this is where the richness of this material can be found (and thus more humor can be unlocked). This isn’t to say Girl Most Likely is a dumb movie, but it suffers the same fate the last two theatrically released films from this duo have (The Nanny Diaries and The Extra Man) they are out of touch without being critical of those that are out of touch. Their first narrative (and doc hybrid) American Splendor was about life at ground level. Luckily this is more interesting and accessible than The Extra Man, but still A Girl Most Likely seems to lack the ambition to pull off what it really should.

With that said, the performances are fine (not their best, but fine), with a few laughs and surprises, it’s not without sequences that drag a little too much and inevitable plot points that you wish it would have the ambition to avoid (including Wiig’s new love interest, which I have said nothing about because its rather predicable). There are lots of better (and worse) films out right now at both your art house and multiplex. And despite the title no one in the film is transgendered.  

Screening: Regal Quaker Crossing, Dipson Amherst