To call Connie and Carla a drag is not only a bad joke, but it is also a pretty fair assessment as to the quality of the movie. I have seen far bigger atrocities committed to screen than Connie and Carla, yet nothing about this movie seems to quite work. Everything from the shoddy romance to the unbearably sugary moral doesn’t seem right for the big screen, but rather for Lifetime: Television for Women (pretending to be men pretending to be women).
In her follow-up to the shockingly huge My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos plays Connie. Who along with best friend Carla (Toni Collette) make up of the dinner-theatre two-some of Connie and Carla. Despite what they may think of themselves, Connie and Carla are NOT very good, and make a living playing to empty seats at an airport bar doing renditions of such famous musicals as Cats, Oklahoma, Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar. When they witness the murder of their boss by the mob, they hit the road and find themselves in California. Looking for work in Beverly Hills, the pair stumble into a drag bar and find work as the entertainment doing what they love, even though the patrons and other staff think they are really men in drag. But its only a matter of time before the jig is up, as the mob is after them, and they are searching every airport lounge, dinner theatre, and drag bar in the country to find and kill these eye-witnesses.
Things start out promising for the flick, with several well timed jokes and one that sent me into hysterics, (too bad it was ripped off from Annie Hall...it was still funny though), and the chemistry between Vardalos and Collette is workable. Things spiral down fast after the first twenty minutes though, as the plot takes a turn into the realm of romantic comedy; attempting to form a romance between Vardalos’ Connie and Jeff, the brother of a drag queen who works with Connie and Carla (played by David Duchovny). It just plain and simple, does not work. Duchovny and Vardalos mix about as well as oil and water, and the only thing that results from this woebegone attempt at a romantic subplot is an even worse subplot that presents the viewer with a moral so sugary, it made me gag. You see, Jeff is about as socially uninhibited as Strom Thurmond, and cannot come to grips with his brother’s sexuality. This of course leads to the whole “be who you are” lesson which is so cliched and tired, it doesn’t even belong on an after-school special.
The premise of Connie and Carla is so out there, that you want to pull a John McEnroe, and start screaming “You can’t be serious!” (You had better believe that without Nia Vardalos’ name attached to this script, it wouldn’t have been green lit by any studio in a million years.) And for the first twenty minutes or so, it seemed that Vardalos wasn’t being serious; perhaps she realized the absurdity of the movie’s plot, and decided to run with it, creating a breezy and bizarre farce. Sadly for us viewers though, she was serious. Like the characters, this movie strives to be taken seriously, and that in itself makes Connie and Carla one big joke.
Grade: D
© 2004 Jacob Sproul
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