My wife and I saw Connie and Carla last night.
The plot is, indeed, a fairly transparent ripoff of existing elements. It’s two parts Some Like It Hot plus one part Victor/Victoria and a dash of Priscilla Queen of the Desert for seasoning (minus that film’s earned pathos).
That’s just the plot structure, though. The gags are almost all completely original. And because of that, the movie works, just barely.
Plots are just frameworks, after all. Nine out of ten romantic comedies could be boiled down to the same vague hundred-word synopsis. What matters is the moment-to-moment interaction of the characters, the specific situations, the specific jokes, and the ostensibly cosmetic elements that we actually find the most entertaining.
And in the case of Connie and Carla, I laughed quite a bit. There is definitely some funny-ass stuff in this movie. (One particularly hilarious running gag centers on the bad guy’s enforcer, a tough Russian mobster assigned by the villain to track down the witnesses to his crime, the titular Connie and Carla. The only thing they know about the two women is that they’re dinner-theater performers, which means the Russian has to travel around the country, dropping in on various performances to see if the women have appeared there, and along the way he learns, by osmosis mostly, a whole lot of show tunes.) Now, it should be said, I rolled my eyes a lot, too (the big climax is yet another public spectacle, like in America’s Sweethearts and a zillion other movies, which I’m getting awfully tired of), but I’m still giving the movie a marginal thumbs up.
Because, really, the movie is a lot more subversive than one might suspect at first. It’s basically a sitcom, with sitcom pacing, sitcom characters, and sitcom jokes. It breaks no narrative or dramatic ground; the storytelling architecture will be familiar to anybody who’s seen a half-dozen episodes of According to Jim or Growing Pains or Becker or any of those. It is almost aggressively a mainstream comedy.
And further, the fact that Nia Vardalos is the writer and toplining star means the advertising will be able to capitalize on the Greek Wedding phenomenon. I felt about Greek Wedding almost exactly the same as I feel about Connie and Carla — not a particularly great movie, particularly with respect to the lazy plotting and haphazard structure, but the characters are pleasant and the punchlines are amusing, so I wound up not disliking the final result. Many people enjoyed Greek Wedding a lot more than I did, making it a word-of-mouth smash hit smack in the middle of the mainstream.
Connie and Carla has much the same energy going for it, and the folks who normally don’t go see movies because they feel neglected by Hollywood’s overwhelming desire for the male teen demographic but who were drawn to Greek Wedding by the buzz may be curious about another movie from the same woman.
But here’s the thing: It’s about drag queens. It’s a statement of love and tolerance masquerading as a dumb, simplistic comedy. Priscilla came close to breaking through to the mainstream, and wound up as a much-loved fringe hit among informed moviegoers. Connie and Carla could do the same, staking out a place even further into the same territory previously claimed by Will and Grace and the like.
Yes, it’s obvious. Yes, more sophisticated viewers, particularly in urban centers, will feel patronized by the movie’s simple-minded point of view. This is a morality play for the 21st century, dressed up with pratfalls and silly gags.
So besides a handful of well-earned belly laughs, I didn’t get a lot out of it, but it would do my mother a world of good. And y’know, that’s not such a bad thing.
