Fey and Poehler don’t play their usual characters.
Best friends and frequent collaborators Tina Fey and Amy Poehler team up again in Sisters, a new comedy from Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore and Saturday Night Live writer Paula Pell. The film follows two sisters in their early 40s, both stagnating in their lives in different ways, who find out that their parents are selling their childhood Orlando home.
The movie takes a while to get into its groove. The opening act plays a bit flat as we’re introduced to Fey’s screw-up older sister Kate Ellis and Poehler’s reserved younger sister Maura Ellis. Kate can’t quite seem to land on her feet as her temper gets the best of her, and her daughter Hayley (Madison Davenport) seems to be more mature than she is. Maura is still recovering from her divorce two years earlier, and is a bit too dedicated to her parents despite the fact she lives in Atlanta. They’re both reunited when their parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest) summon them home to clean out their childhood rooms before they sell the house.
We want to hear it.
Because both sisters are stuck in a state of arrested development, they decide that the best way to show their displeasure with their parents’ decision to sell their Florida house to a pair of stuck up New Yorkers is to throw a massive “Ellis Island” party in the style of their high school ragers. They invite their former high school friends for a blow out event that fortunately does have the consequences that type of behavior (especially from adults) needs.
Bell’s skills as a sketch writer brings out the best in Poehler and Fey in many standalone sequences, but the script itself is a bit flat. Scenes like when Maura and Greta Lee’s Hae Won struggle to pronounce each others names or a repeated gag of Bobby Moynihan’s Alex being high on a new synthetic drug are some of the funniest of the movie. The problem is that the actual plot feels relatively formulaic, and much of the story beats that the film hits have been done before.
Sisters gets into its groove when the Ellis Island party gets underway, and there’s a figurative revolving door of Saturday Night Live cast members and writers woven into the plot. Maya Rudolph, Moynihan, Rachel Dratch, Kate McKinnon, John Lutz and Chris Parnell all play supporting roles, while Ike Barinholtz, John Leguizamo, John Cena and Samantha Bee round out the ensemble.
The two leads play against type in different sorts of roles than they usually inhabit, and unsurprisingly it’s the sequences where they just get to riff that are the funniest. Fey and Poehler have incredible chemistry, and they seem to be having a blast in this movie. They seem to be enjoying not playing versions of themselves, but because of that Sisters might not be the type of hang out movie that fans of the comedians are expecting.
Sisters is raunchy and boisterous, often crass for the sake of humor. For the most part, it hits those jokes, but the fun of the movie is disconnected from the message. The Ellis sisters want to have one last night of youthful revelry before giving up their childhood home, and they give their now-adult high school friends the same type of night. But despite the fact that the frat-style party sequence is the funniest part of the movie, this is a film challenging its main characters to grow up, so it’s difficult to fully embrace the insanity that breaks out. Fortunately the conclusion of the film finds a balance between its conceit and its comedy, but director Moore doesn’t seem to know how to treat middle-aged characters with the same sort of care and understanding as he does his college-aged characters in Pitch Perfect, because what works for one group does not always work for the other.
Sisters at its best is a chance to see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler riff off one another and their ensemble of friends in a movie that centers around an epic party. But the plot of the film doesn’t match that “good time” vibe Sisters wants to capture, and the message it is trying to send gets muddied in the mix.
