Saturday Night Live has always had hilarious women on the show: see Radner, Gilda. I would say the best group of women the show ever had was in the late 1990s – early 2000s, including one of the best head writers the show ever had, Tina Fey. Having not done an ensemble comedy in a hot minute, the girls all reunite in Wine Country, celebrating middle age with drinking, Jason Schwartzman, and feelings.
It’s Rebecca’s (Rachel Dratch) 50th birthday. Despite insisting she doesn’t want anything big, her friend Abby (Amy Poehler) organizes a trip for Rebecca and their old time friends to go to wine country in California. Abby, Rebecca, and one friend Val (Paula Pell) are excited to go. The trip is not without complications though, as Catherine (Ana Gasteyer), Naomi (Maya Rudolph) and Jenny (Emily Spivey), have other things or fears on their mind to be fully committed to Rebecca’s big day.
The selling point, and the best parts, of Wine Country are the hang out conversations these 6 women have. You know how funny Dratch, Poehler, Rudolph and Gasteyer are, since they were 4 cast members on Saturday Night Live. The 2 unknowns are Paula Pell and Emily Spivey. SNL fans will know them as the creative force behind the show, as both are truly great writers. Being sort of blank slates, both get a chance to create a funny character: Pell is doing a lesbian Melissa McCarthy thing, very brazen and outgoing in fun ways, while Spivey gives Jenny a perenially funny nervous energy to the story nicely juxtaposing against the real emotional nerves of the other 4. Tina Fey pops in for 15 minutes playing a lumberjack….prognosticator? It’s unclear, but she’s having a blast doing it. The easygoing friendships of these women let the organic conflict of the story rise and fall naturally: there’s no real build to a blowup, no real withholding of information, for long periods of time, because of how well these women know each other, letting Wine Country go down like a seasoned smooth Cab.
The toughest hurdle Wine Country has trouble getting over (in it’s newly replaced kneecaps) is your classic ensemble comedy problem: what’s funny to them is not always what’s funny to the audience. As comedians age, they start falling into routines of comedy to make each other laugh. You can see across all these ladies faces that the goal of each scene is to cause one of the others to drown in fits of laughing related tears. Those types of goal rely on inside jokes between friends, so without that context, the audience is going to be lost most of the time. Every now and again, the talents of the ladies shines through (the art gallery scene is particularly scathing), but Wine County feels a lot like recent Simpsons episodes: occasionally brilliant, but failing to take off consistently.
Wine Country is a perfect film to watch with some friends you haven’t seen in a while. You know, grab a bottle of wine, maybe some good food, and sit out the couch laughing at Ana Gasteyer and Tina Fey throwing darts in a dive bar in Napa Valley. Or what Netflix’s algorithm calls: Friday evening.