Roadside Attractions
After reigning supreme on Saturday Night Live for seven years, Kristen Wiig made her voice in film loudly and rightly known in 2011 with Bridesmaids, which she starred in and cowrote with Annie Mumolo. Punching giant cookies, wooing Irish cops and forcing her friends to defecate in sinks at bridal salons set her up as an invaluable asset to a host of comedies and dramedies in the years since, like Friends with Kids, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Girl Most Likely.
Meanwhile, Bill Hader, probably one of the greatest talents from the SNL stage, has always had a healthy career as a bit player in comedies. While he hasn’t had a vehicle like Bridesmaids yet to largely showcase his worth, he’s been the supportive wing man, henchman, insert-assistant-title-here, delivering the best lines and effectively stealing the show in everything from Superbad to The To Do List. But his side-character status might be changing to leading man now that he’s teamed up with his former TV costar.
(This is what I’ve been waiting for since watching Hader burst into tears during Wiig’s “Ruby Tuesday” sendoff from SNL in May 2012. When Hader cries, I cry.)
The duo plays siblings in Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, a dramedy that puts less focus on their wacky and slapstick energy and more on subdued and quiet humor. But that doesn’t mean things can’t be as weird as always. The first trailer for the film shows the estranged brother and sister reuniting after 10 years of not talking or seeing each other when Maggie (Wiig) invites the depressed Milo (Hader) to live with her and her husband, played by Luke Wilson.
Their relationship is strained, but bits of wonderful, bizarre behavior peeks through, like lip synching to ’80s ballads and trying on headgear at the dentist’s office where Maggie works and dressing Milo up in drag just so they can feel a little sense of joy in their lives. Whatever happened to these twins to make them feel so very skeletal goes unrevealed, but it appears that good things are to come.
The film won the Best Screenplay Award at Sundance, and had the distinction of making our own list of the 14 Best Movies of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Check out the trailer below:
The Skeleton Twins is in theaters September 19th.
