Now that she’s gone from “Saturday Night Live,” we’re entering a new phase of Kristen Wiig‘s career. The actress already had a monster hit under her belt thanks to “Bridesmaids,” but to her credit, she didn’t rush into the first paycheck that came along, mixing big-time comedies like this Christmas’s duo of “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty“ and “Anchorman: The Legend Continues“ with indies like the upcoming “Hateship, Loveship“ and “The Skeleton Twins.”
But the first big-screen gig she took after the success of “Bridesmaids” was “Imogene.” Directed by “American Splendor” pair Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the dark comedy screened at TIFF last September, before Lionsgate & Roadside Attractions picked it up, and retitled it “Girl Most Likely.” And now a trailer has arrived, via JoBlo’s YouTube account.
The film sees Wiig as a playwright who fakes her suicide in order to win back an ex-boyfriend, which causes her to be put in the charge of her estranged mother, Annette Bening. There, she must share a roof with her brother (Christopher Fitzgerald), her mother’s boyfriend (Matt Dillon) and the lodger who’s renting her room (“Glee” star Darren Criss). From the footage here, there seems to be a certain amount to look forward to, not least what looks to be a scene-stealing performance by Bening, but we’re not quite sold on the whole.
And indeed, our TIFF review found it something of a mixed bag, describing it as “occasionally winning, a touch too sitcom-y, but often very funny look at one woman’s offbeat family and her attempts at her discovering just what went wrong on the road to success.” It’s clearly not going to be the next “Bridesmaids,” but it could end up as a bit of a summer sleeper when it lands on July 19th.