“The Other Woman” is a coarse, rickety comedy, and the movie’s glamorous superstar, Cameron Diaz, plays the title role – a sexy, upright New York lawyer who goes into mission mode when she learns that her serious boyfriend (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a married man. It’s supposed to be irresistibly piquant that she teams up with the man’s spouse to punish him. But the movie’s main attraction is Leslie Mann, who plays the wronged wife.
She’s been in far better movies (like her real-life husband, Judd Apatow’s, “This Is 40”), but this slipshod revenge farce unleashes her full powers. She comes on like Gracie Allen and the whole First Wives’ Club rolled into one. If Mann had a director strong enough to modulate her slapstick and her nonstop non sequiturs, she might have given a classic farce performance. Even without any help, she provides squiggly lines of energy that keep the movie fitfully alive before it goes completely brain-dead.
In one of Mann’s opening riffs, she says she needs to attend “brain camp” to motivate her gray cells with brain teasers while she scarfs down “gingko balboa.” When her slick, loathsomely narcissistic husband corrects her – “balboa” is Rocky’s last name, biloba is gingko’s – she doesn’t feel put down. She’s delighted that she’s proved right about her need for a mental workout.
A lot of the movie is like that. Mann’s crazy performing instincts and her character’s open-ended enthusiasm redeem lines and situations that could have been demeaning or outright insulting.
When her contractor brother (Taylor Kinney), the one wholesome guy in the movie, questions whether she knows what she’s doing when she and her new best friend (Diaz) start tracking her lousy spouse, she tells him to stop bothering them with “man logic.” This woman has her own Mann logic. She’s inspired as a ditz and wholehearted as a physical comedian – every time she takes a step, it’s a pratfall waiting to happen.
It’s tempting to call Mann “a force of nature,” but what’s funniest about her in “The Other Woman” is that she isn’t natural. She’s like a housewife from the “I Love Lucy” era who hurtled through a time warp and has emerged in this millennium wrapped up like a Stepford Wife but with inchoate desires for liberation.
The nuttiness of her character gives her an edge on her co-star, Diaz, who is supposed to be a no-nonsense attorney with a killer instinct. Diaz is amusing when she maintains her cynical edge, telling Mann to “cry on the inside, like a winner.” But she soon drops her lawyerly identity with her partner in crime and becomes little more than a curvy straight man. She also melts instantly for her pal’s contractor brother.
In this would-be sisterhood-is-powerful farce, the Connecticut hausfrau and the Manhattan hottie enlist another of the villain’s innocent lovers, Kate Upton, in their plot to wreck the bad guy’s life. I assume it’s meant to be empowering that Diaz and Mann extol the virtues of Upton’s voluptuous form. But the movie doesn’t know what to do with this amiable model when she isn’t bouncing around in a bikini.
Before she returns for the forced and formless climax, Upton disappears without explanation. It may not be Upton’s fault. Storytelling is not the strong suit of screenwriter Melissa Stack or director Nick Cassavetes. (Of course, that begs the question: What is?) At one point, Diaz crashes through a trellis outside Mann and Coster-Waldau’s master bedroom. The movie simply leaves the star on her back amid the splinters. Then it lurches on to the next scene.
In the first half-hour, “The Other Woman” elicits groans from the sight of Mann’s Great Dane defecating on the floor of Diaz’s all-white Tribeca loft. So it’s not surprising that the team’s antics involve sabotaging Coster-Waldau’s digestive system (causing “a fecal accident”), lacing his breakfast smoothie with estrogen to extend his belly and elongate his nipples, and putting hair remover in his shampoo. Eventually, the women conspire to bring down his budding illegal enterprises in a climax that’s like “‘The Firm’ for Dummies.”
The movie treats Don Johnson, as Diaz’s hedonistic, much-married father, with more respect than it does Nicki Minaj, who plays her secretary. The office scenes contain several shots emphasizing her expansive rear end. The last we see of Johnson (spoiler alert!), he’s with a certain supermodel sporting “Just Married” on her bikini bottom. Diaz at one point sums up her team’s assets as “the lawyer, the wife, the boobs.” All she leaves out is “the booty.”
Contact the writer: msragow@ocregister.com
