Girl Most Likely movie review (2013)

May 2024 · 2 minute read

Husband-and-wife directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have had success in the past with inspired subject matter, such as the excellent "American Splendor" from 2003. Here, they're working from a script by Michelle Morgan that's chock-full of contrived situations and very few moments that actually ring true.

It contains a menagerie of quirky weirdos: people we're clearly meant to laugh at for being ridiculous, delusional, pathetic or all of the above, up until the precise moment that we're supposed to join the film in doing a 180-degree turn and embracing them for being exactly who they are. This is the formulaic, inevitable journey Wiig's character, Imogene, must travel.

At the film's start, she's a well-to-do Manhattan magazine writer attending a society event with her obviously evasive longtime boyfriend. It's clear she doesn't quite fit in with these old-moneyed women, though—she doesn't have the right pedigree or wear the right dress or say just the right, vapid thing in conversation.

With head-spinning swiftness, Imogene loses her boyfriend, job and apartment and fakes a suicide attempt, all of which plays out in broad, sitcommy fashion. And so this once-promising playwright must return to her hometown, a place she's been running from her whole adult life: the cheesy slab of boardwalk known as Ocean City, N.J. (In case we didn't know we were in New Jersey, "Girl Most Likely" features really obvious song choices on the soundtrack from both Bon Jovi AND Bruce Springsteen.)

There, she is forced to coexist in a cramped, cluttered beach house with her blowsy, hard-gambling mother, Zelda (Annette Bening in a husky accent) and Zelda's younger boyfriend, an alleged CIA agent who goes by the name George Bousche (say it out loud). He's played by Matt Dillon. There's also Imogene's younger brother, Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald), who's obsessed with crabs and appears to be mentally challenged in some unspecified way; and Lee ("Glee" star Darren Criss), the twenty-something who's renting out Imogene's childhood bedroom.

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