The movie stretches the material of a half-hour show to an hour and a half, with no subplots, and lifts a number of the best lines from the series. It's stretched but holds its shape and definitely shows the benefit of those three seasons of development. (The relationship of the series to the movie is comparable to the Marx Brothers' taking their show on the road to test the material that became A Day at the Races [1937].) As a thoroughgoing example of low-comic irony, the big-screen Strangers With Candy deserves a niche of honor alongside the Farrelly Brothers' Kingpin (1996) and Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor's Citizen Ruth (1996), as well as the very best of Chaplin's early shorts, the ones in which he really comes across as a scroungy tramp rather than the "soulful" Little Fellow who protects dogs and blind girls and orphans.
Strangers With Candy is unimaginable without Amy Sedaris as Jerri. Sedaris is pretty enough to have had a repeated role on Sex and the City but has an hallucinatorily elastic face: she gives Jerri a buck-toothed grimace that is as tempting as it is difficult to imitate. In this respect, Sedaris is easily on a par with Jim Carrey, and in her lack of concern for being conventionally attractive or likeable, she's way ahead of him.
A portion of our responses are due to the costuming and the hair and make-up: Sedaris wears unflattering "Comfort Zone" get-ups over "fatty" padding on her ass and thighs, hideous stiff wigs, garish eye shadow, and stains on her teeth. But she's also a fantastic mime. Her head movements perfectly punctuate the lessons she's getting wrong, and she's absolute mistress of a buggy eye tic.
In addition, Jerri always finds cruel jokes and painful mishaps funny, no matter who the victim is, even herself, and Sedaris does a single-shoulder movement when she laughs to rival Chaplin's ability to make sobbing, when seen from behind, indistinguishable from agitating a cocktail shaker. Sedaris's voice, unlike Chaplin's, is constantly surprising you as well. It can parodically mimic girlish expectancy, the "wisdom" of hard experience, a jailbird's bravado, seductiveness, frustration, and simultaneously both breakthrough realization and idiocy.
Moreover, the writing team has a Swiftian perception of the grossness of human physicality; no equally achieved comedy with a female protagonist has ever been nastier. Jerri, for instance, thinks it alluring to inform intended partners that she's "moist as a snake cake down there." What you see in one episode of "down there" — (a stunt double's) bruised, cottage-cheesy inner thighs, crowned by a little bell hanging from an unseen labial piercing — will definitely put you off your snake cake.
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Article comments
1 - Alan Dale
you have not said it in ways i thought you never could, bravo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! your B.F.
2 - Al Barger
Hey, that's some outstanding writing, Mr Dale. I watched just one or two episodes of the series, but this definitely has me interested in seeing the feature film.
3 - Alan Dale
Lee Siegel alert: that top e-mail is, in truth, from the B.F. He's not a computer wiz and so he used my log-on without realizing that it would make it look as if I had attempted to comment on my own writing under a pseudonym. Sorry for any confusion.
4 - Alan Dale
Thank you, Mr. Barger for your comment. I'm thrilled that it has made you want to check the movie out. (Remember, though, I was quoting from the series as well as the movie.) SWC has turned me into a combination of St. Paul and Typhoid Mary--I want everyone to succumb, for their own good.
5 - Hobokamp
Now that was the most thoroughly in-depth review of SWC that I have ever seen! Bravo, well done. You really "get" what they were putting out there. What seems simple and sometimes bizarre on the surface unfolds nicely into a strangely insightful comment on society once you scratch the surface, right? Thanks for the great read-hope Amy, Paul and Stephen all get a chance to see it.
6 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Hobokamp. (Or is that spelled V-I-C-T-O-R-Y?) I totally agree that the show seems simple and bizarre on the surface, but reveals a totally coherent vision underneath. The only thing I would alter is that SWC strikes me as going deeper than social commentary. It dramatizes the lowest estimate of what we humans are, in ourselves. If you know how to send the review to the SWC, please do. Thanks again.
7 - Michael J. West
So if I found the TV show stale, clumsy, and unfunny--which I did--will the movie change my mind?
8 - Erin
What a pleasure to read this in-depth analysis of my favorite show. To those who find it stale & unfunny - you haven't watched it enough. Amy Sedaris does deserve a nomination for Best Actress.
Mr. Dale, I would love to see your review of my favorite audiobook, "Wigfield."
9 - Alan Dale
Dear Michael, I doubt the movie will change your mind. No accounting for taste! Thanks for writing.
10 - Alan Dale
Hey Erin, Thanks for the comment. It's hard for those of us on the other side of the SWC mirror to realize that some people might not like what they see. I have the disease and I don't want the cure! I doubt that further viewing will contaminate someone as resistant as Michael seems to be, however. I'll have to check Wigfield out.