Mark Reviews Movies: LIFE OF THE PARTY (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 10, 2018

If anything, Life of the Party proves for certain that Melissa McCarthy is a great comic actor. We probably knew that before, considering her range of roles and within a single role, as well as the way she could make even the most obnoxious characters somewhat sympathetic. Here, she's provided with a series of obvious or half-baked gags. They shouldn't be funny, and to be fair, they aren't for the most part. McCarthy, though, will do something or a series of somethings within those gags, and what shouldn't be and wasn't funny a second ago suddenly becomes funny.

That doesn't change much of the final effect of director Ben Falcone's movie, which is mostly an excuse to put McCarthy's character in a variety of scenarios in which she can be embarrassed, gleefully over-the-top, or awkwardly out-of-place. The premise is a fish-out-of-water story about a middle-aged woman who re-enrolls in college to finish her final year and finally earn her degree.

While at school, she parties, gets involved in a sexual relationship with a younger guy, becomes a minor celebrity on campus, and bonds with her daughter, who's also attending the same university. Yes, it's pretty much everything that we'd expect from such a story, and the only unexpected elements come from specific bits in McCarthy's performance.

There's a certain naïveté to the way that McCarthy plays the part that's endearing. The character is Deanna, whose husband Dan (Matt Walsh) tells her that he wants a divorce. As they're leaving after dropping off their daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon) for her senior year, Dan tells Deanna that he has been having an affair and is in love with another woman. Also, he's selling the house.

With her life upturned, Deanna decides to return to school. She had dropped out before her senior year after becoming pregnant with Maddie. The "agreement" between her and Dan was that it made more sense for him to finish college. She always meant to go back and earn her degree, but life got in the way. Now, she's free to do whatever she wants.

There's really no plot of which to speak. Deanna makes fast friends with the other students in Maddie's sorority. They like her quite a bit, and despite Maddie's embarrassment and not-so-subtle attempts to get her mom out of the way, the other young women want Deanna around.

There are parties. There's drinking. There are drunken and sober hook-ups with Jack (Luke Benward), who becomes kind of clingy but in a way that Deanna finds flattering. The screenplay, written by the husband-and-wife team of Falcone and McCarthy, offers one genuine surprise in relation to Jack, which turns an awkward encounter between Dan and his new fiancé (played by Julie Bowen) into an uncomfortable moment of triumph for Deanna. That scene is funny on its own.

On their own merits, the rest of the scenes aren't nearly as funny, if at all. The more memorable ones allow McCarthy to show off her penchant for physical comedy. One is an extended scene of her dancing at an '80s-themed party, although it's only memorable because of its predictability. Another has her standing in front of her archeology class to give an oral presentation. She's afraid of public speaking, and it's impressive just how far McCarthy takes that single piece of setup for the scene. It begins with some shtick involving an uncooperative podium, but by the end, Deanna is a sweating, growling, and queasy mess. That the scene starts so poorly but earns some genuine laughs is all in how McCarthy naturally and logically escalates Deanna's terror.

Besides McCarthy's, the movie doesn't care much about these characters. Sure, there are some amusing moments from some reliable people, such as Stephen Root as Deanna's still over-protective father and Maya Rudolph as her stalwart best friend. Gillian Jacobs plays Helen, one of the sorority sisters, who is also late in attending college, due to being in a coma for eight years. The character is weird, naturally, and the deadpan way that Jacobs plays it provides more humor than the character probably deserves. The same can be said of Deanna's shut-in, almost vampire-like roommate Leonor (Heidi Gardner).

Otherwise, it's McCarthy's show, and for as much innocent and good-natured cheer as she provides Deanna, the character and the movie are, for the most part, dead-ends. Yes, Deanna changes from a mousy housewife to an independent, fearless woman, but that shift is dictated entirely by the movie's more prominent scenes of comedy. If the comedy—which, by the way, also includes that moldy chestnut of a scene in which characters get high without realizing it—doesn't work, then there's really no point.

When the comedy does work, it's almost exclusively because of McCarthy. That can't be stated enough. Life of the Party once again shows that she can elevate some lazy comic material beyond its inherent limitations. What she needs—and, unfortunately, doesn't typically get—is material that matches her abilities.

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