Friendship between women can be a terrifying thing. As a woman who is extremely introverted, I don’t think anything in my life has filled me with more anxiety than navigating the waters between women — between friends and best friends, between best friends and enemies. One day you and your best friend are inseparable, the next? You stop speaking until one of you has the good sense to apologize, whether she was in the wrong or not.
My greatest fear, from kindergarten to college, was that my best friend would replace me. Maybe it was irrational. Maybe it was a product of growing up, every year finding something new in common with another girl in my group of friends that made me closer to her than the BFF of years previous.
In my experience, girls competing for the attention of other girls has always been more fraught than girls competing for the attention of boys, and there was nothing worse than that creeping realization that my days were numbered. More often than not, I cut myself off from my friends before they could do the same to me. I wanted to protect myself. I lost a lot of good friends that way, and only within the last couple years have I realized just how much that must have hurt them.
Teenage girls are selfish, and teenage girls feel everything keenly. The wounds they internalize — in my case, almost entirely self-inflicted — fester and follow them to adulthood. They become bad habits. Case in point? I have exactly zero college friends. Instead, I have internet friends with whom I spent every waking hour writing neverending fan fiction (hello, escapism), and friends I met and went drinking with nightly because we were all stuck at the same shit job at the Muncie JCPenney. I’m still not great at being friends with other women because of the choices I made in high school. I still don’t really know how to tread these waters.
But seeing my greatest childhood fear turned into a delightfully smart comedy helps.
Calling “Rough Night,” directed by Lucia Aniello and co-written by Aniello and Paul W. Downs, “ 'The Hangover' for ladies" is so reductive and, frankly, insulting that I’m going to pretend “The Hangover” doesn’t exist. “Rough Night’s” closest mainstream equivalent is probably “Bridesmaids,” which I did not like because it took the theme of friendship and replacement and made it petty. “Rough Night” is crude and absurd, and definitely toes some very fine comedic lines, but it’s never ugly. And that is such a relief.
Raunchy comedies too often punch down, and I honestly went into this one expecting the same, despite its “Broad City” pedigree. There are too many easy jokes to be made about the five women at the center of this movie: Scarlett Johansson’s bride-to-be politician, Jillian Bell’s insecure best friend, Kate McKinnon’s oddball Australian interloper, Ilana Grazer’s braless activist, and Zoë Kravitz’s bisexual divorcee. I don’t have to make the jokes; they’re right there, waiting for a white guy to spit out with a smirk on his face and a “PC culture is ruining America!” comeback for the first person to call him out.
The best thing about “Rough Night” is that it never makes these jokes. It never makes these women a punchline. It never punishes them for being crude or liberated, and best of all, it never makes these women shame each other (though they do lightly judge Johansson’s Jess for using self-waxing strips). As their bachelorette party goes wrong and a stripper ends up dead, tensions escalate and barbs are thrown, but the most personal attacks are never about another woman's body, sexuality or race. Instead, they’re about growing up and growing apart.
When it comes right down to it, “Rough Night” isn’t about the chaos that ensues when these women accidentally kill a stripper and try to hide it. It’s about how women navigate friendship when enough years have passed that they don’t have much in common anymore. And, more importantly, it’s about supporting your friends through their best and worst moments.
The most recent time these women got together (with the exception of McKinnon, a new addition to the group) was when Kravitz’s Blair gave birth to her son three years ago; now she’s in the middle of an ugly custody battle. She keeps this from her friends before and during the party, and when she finally tells them, she admits it was because she didn’t want their judgment — specifically, the judgment of her ex-girlfriend, Glazer’s Frankie. Taken aback, Frankie tells her, “I would never judge you for that,” and the look on Blair’s face shows both the abating fear and rising relief she feels at hearing Frankie saying those words.
It’s a true and quiet moment before the dead body on the floor demands their attention yet again. Those emotional exchanges hit few and far between the hijinks, but when they do, they hit hard — especially with Bell’s Alice. Out of all the girls, Alice suffers the most, both for being the one to accidentally kill the stripper and the one who clings the hardest to a friendship that grew up without her. As a result, she misidentifies McKinnon’s Pippa as the biggest threat to her friendship with Jess, instead of her own actions or the dead guy they have to deal withl.
But, again, Alice’s insecurities never make her ugly or unsympathetic, and if I sound repetitive here it’s because other comedies of this type would make her the villain, casually and without really understanding why. This one just makes her what she is: The friend who won’t loosen her grip because she’s afraid that if she does, she’ll lose the best friend she can’t live without. That’s a fear I imagine many women can relate to, and it’s very good that this movie does not demonize Alice for it.
Of course, because this is a comedy, and comedies end with union and not separation, the girls make it through their legal and emotional travails relatively unscathed. There’s no small amount of white female privilege and a kind of troubling justification for murder at play in the resolution, but at least this movie is woke enough to call out some of the women for not knowing who Daniel Holtzclaw is while they immediately recognize his fictional equivalent in Matt Dillon’s character from “Crash” (2005). Baby steps, I guess.
I’m a little worried “Rough Night” won’t be given credit for everything in achieves. I think too many critics will judge it “samey,” and others will say it doesn’t go far enough in either its humor or its conclusions. Both may be true, but both kind of miss the point. Attacking conflict through comedy is always risky, but that’s what the best comedies do. The best comedies have a point.
Before this, my favorite comedy to address the complexity of female friendship was “Jennifer’s Body,” and in a weird way, “Rough Night” is a pretty good companion to that movie. Through satirical horror (the former) and modern Shakespearean absurdity (the latter), both are unapologetic in their depictions of how unimaginably stressful it is to be and remain friends with other women. And we have their respective directors and writers to thank for that. You can tell that “Bridesmaids” was directed by a man. Here, you can tell “Rough Night” was directed by a woman, for women, full stop. And that’s something I want to see more of.
Sometimes the best way to defeat your demons is first to recognize them, and then to laugh at them without shame.