Fauci recommends staying six miles away from ‘Friendsgiving’
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Before binging on the joy-punishing atrocity that is “Friendsgiving,” let’s focus on the positive. When Molly (Malin Akerman) asks her irresponsible, sexed-up mother Helen (Jane Seymour with a Swedish accent!) “Why are you holding him like a handbag?” after observing her mom’s method of carrying around Molly’s son, my mouth did register that as a joke. I didn’t laugh or smile, but I was aware that it was a joke.
Yep, that’s the highlight. Otherwise, there are so many things to loathe about this movie that I need an itemized list to even begin to pick the worst:
The opening sequence in which Molly and her new boyfriend Jeff (Jack Donnelly) try out some dom/sub action while also keeping an eye on the baby monitor, as if elevating the kink will make it any less derivative of “Neighbors.”
That Jack is simultaneously a deceitful lowlife who claims to be a philanthropist but clearly has no money and just leeches off of people but is simultaneously a kind, emotionally stable person so the movie doesn’t have to reckon at all with the recently divorced Molly irresponsibly making Jeff a part of her young son’s life after dating just a couple weeks.
Literally every choice made by Kat Dennings as Abby, who is still nursing a year-old breakup, wears a shirt that just says “Nope” and is the nadir of the grumpy, underplayed style that somehow turned her into a star after “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.” Yes, the material here isn’t good, but there are moments that are only as intolerable as they are because of the empty performance driving them.
Every second involving FaceTime calls with Abby’s family members, who seem to be rehearsing for a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” spinoff about Italians that (thankfully, please please please) doesn’t exist.
The supporting characters who come to the party, including Rick (Andrew Santino), who raves about his wife Brianne (Christine Taylor), “How hot is my wife? Do you want to poke her?” Later he explains that they met four months ago but “See tits like that, gotta have ‘em, gotta get ‘em, gotta keep ‘em.” Aisha Tyler, who should not be allowed to do comedy either, also appears as Lauren, and if you don’t like her sober you’ll really love her once mushrooms get involved.
Different comic-relief lesbian characters periodically addressing the camera with what type of partner they are and are looking for, including Rhea Butcher as a woman whose dream date is a dungeon followed by “a sound bath and intense, intense cuddling.”
Abby (who is a lesbian, a fact the movie determines to remind us of every 12 seconds) seeing visions of her “fairy gaymothers,” who are played by Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho and Fortune Feimster and utilize the just brilliant catchphrase “There’s no place like Home Depot.”
A gag about male breastfeeding that wasn’t funny either on “The League,” and a lesbian explaining that she doesn’t like basketball because she doesn’t like balls of any kind, a joke that should have to pay royalties to “Clueless.”
Likable, funny presences like Ryan Hansen (“Veronica Mars”) and Chelsea Peretti (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) being involved in something this lousy as Molly’s ex and an amateur shaman, more characters the film doesn’t know what to do with but at least provide shreds of hope?
When Helen talks about being sexually active in the ‘70s and adds “You were lucky if they even asked back then," Abby says, "Are you talking about rape?" The movie treats this as a joke, just as it does when a delivery man who can’t believe he’s at Molly’s house (she’s an actress currently starring in “Pluto Raiders”) declares, “Now I know where you live.” Writer-director Nicol Paone has a terrible, creepy sense of humor, with no idea how to do discomfort or bad taste properly, and a comic rhythm that’s way too slow to make anything hit properly.
In other words, this collection of terrible, annoying people being terrible and annoying is a 20-way tie for last place. This is the kind of movie about which people sometimes lazily say, “It looks like it was a lot more fun to film than it was to watch,” but “Friendsgiving,” which certainly could have been an appealing comedy about found family and the difficulty of finding space to grieve lost relationships, doesn’t look like it was fun to make either. It’s just people taking bad work and doing a horrible job bringing it to life, with exhaustion setting in after approximately six seconds and falling deeper and deeper into a hole until the thing just sort of stops.
D-
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