It’s a reality universally acknowledged that the trampy heroine of any trendy female-slanted romcom should make Bridget Jones seem like Grace Kelly by comparability. And whereas Leah McKendrick’s function debut provides extra caustic com than rom, it leans onerous into the legacy of Helen Fielding’s famously underachieving singleton. Since then, we’ve had Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids and Sophie Hyde’s Animals, and Scrambled definitely belongs in that extra riotous subgenre of films about girls behaving badly.
McKendrick takes a unique tack to most, although, and its material — how do you put together for motherhood whenever you’re not but match to be a mom? — is a tricky promote, and sometimes looks like uncooked materials for an extremely private stand-up set from a comic that likes to shock with overshare.
McKendrick — who writes and directs herself in her function debut — performs small-time jewellery designer Nellie Robertson, who has just lately damaged up together with her longtime accomplice, Shawn. We meet her on the marriage ceremony of her greatest good friend, Sheila (Ego Nwodim), who appears shell-shocked by her personal determination to tie the knot (“We have been gonna be the final single bitches on the finish of the earth!”).
Realizing that Sheila is pregnant, Nellie rescinds her type provide of a tab of Molly, however drops one herself and events onerous on the reception. Which is the place she has her epiphany: after operating into an older good friend, she will get a harsh lecture concerning the course her life is on. “I do know you as a result of I was you,” says the good friend. “And so, the subsequent time you’ve simply boned a scorching bartender and also you’re sitting in his toilet, watching a bathe crusted with pubes and that fucking Combat Membership/Reservoir Canines/Scarface poster, I need you to recollect my face.”
That face shall be there to remind Nellie that, opposite to her perception, the 30s aren’t “simply the 20s however with cash,” they’re the gateway to the 40s, the 50s and eternally. Which units Nellie desirous about the prospect of parenthood and prompts one of many movie’s many zingy one-liners: “I don’t even know if I need children — I’ve seen Euphoria.”
This early mid-life disaster — introduced on, because the prophet presaged, by a grubby toilet and a Scarface poster — prompts Nellie to research the potential for freezing her eggs, which is able to change into a prolonged and costly course of costing hundreds of {dollars}. So she borrows half and throws herself into the therapy, all of the whereas surrounded by associates who’re marrying off and leaving her behind “on the planet of excommunicated singles”.
Having selected a plan of action, Nellie decides to get again into the relationship sport, calling up exes and numerous randoms for barroom hook-ups that throw up humorous moments, just like the shifty man with an ankle tag who flees when his parole officer calls (he’s dubbed “The Cult Chief”). Nellie additionally begins to dread visits to her mother and father’ house, the place her loving however tactless father Richard (Clancy Brown) is baffled by the sudden onset of stasis in his daughter’s life – and talks about it lots. Then there’s the nosy neighbor Parveen (Vee Kumari), who all the time appears to see Nellie at her worst.
It’s set-up for a comedy, with its girl-power sentiments about single-parenting and placing one’s emotional affairs so as. However the setup is actually all there’s, with no distinctive sport plan aside from to see Nellie get to the end line together with her therapy. And although McKendrick is a proficient author, she is prone to be a divisive presence, even for receptive audiences. She writes some nice dialogue — largely for herself — however there are pages and pages of it, and when Nellie is in her quieter moments… Properly, she really rarely is, as a result of any shred of introspection is prone to be coated off in a frenetic montage, with Nellie dancing to a membership banger or an influence ballad, giving Scrambled a fractured, stop-start, show-tell-show sort of narrative, like a Pixies music in story type.
A key scene occurs in the direction of the top when Nellie attends a assist group for the bereaved mother and father of miscarried infants and has been stood up the good friend whose hand she is there to carry. It’s a schmaltzy scene that McKendrick skewers when Nellie will get as much as depart, revealing her true state of affairs and clumsily joking that she hopes to take pleasure in “the thrill of miscarriage” herself sooner or later. However the scene continues, and Nellie charms the birds from the timber with a staggeringly tone-deaf, solipsistic speech that, whether or not it occurred in actual life or not, performs out just like the sort of nonsense you may learn on Twitter’s “Didn’t Occur Of The 12 months Awards”.
It’s maybe as a result of the snark is a lot authentic than the in any other case predictable emotional story beats that moments like this are so irritating, and, certainly, Scrambled ends with a nagging sense of critically unrealized potential, regardless of the synthetic whoo-let’s-have-a-party sugar excessive that’s slathered over the top credit. Which can appear harsh, however as author, director, and star McKendrick set herself a excessive bar to start out with, and it’s to her credit score that Scrambled comes with the promise of extra and higher to observe.
Title: Scrambled
Pageant: SXSW, Narrative Function Competitors
Director: Leah McKendrick
Screenwriter: Leah McKendrick
Forged: Leah McKendrick, Ego Nwodim, Andrew Santino
Working time: 1 hr 37 min
