BEFORE: I wasn't exactly sure if this even belongs in the romance chain, but I'm taking a chance. I had taped this to go with "Young Adult" and the two films were next to each other in the line-up for a while, only separated by my recent re-organization. Andrea Martin appears in a cameo, and carries over from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding".
THE PLOT: A failed New York playwright awkwardly navigates the transition from Next Big Thing to Last Year's News.
AFTER: Well, there is a romance within the film, but it's really a small part of the plot. The film does begin with a break-up, however, so that qualifies it too. And the secondary theme for the week, which runs through "Young Adult", "The Heartbreak Kid", "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and this one, is all about the central characters realizing who they are, often after a romantic setback, and then struggling to find a way to re-invent themselves. Tonight, Imogene (much like Toula in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding") has to come to terms with her strange family if she's going to be stable enough to move forward in her life.
The film opens with Imogene as a kid in a school production of "The Wizard of Oz", and as Dorothy she's clicking her heels but refusing to say the line "There's no place like home," primarily because she doesn't believe it, given her strange home life. But it points out an interesting NITPICK POINT about that 1939 film - if Oz was such a magical and wonderful place, why was Dorothy so eager to go back to Kansas, where she worked on a farm, and they hadn't even invented color yet?
Fast-forward to Imogene as an adult, and she's a playwright in NYC who can't seem to produce a valid second work after being named "most promising" by New York magazine, and when her relationship crumbles, a fake suicide attempt is mistaken for a real one, and she's released into the custody of her mother, who she hasn't spoken to in years. Returning to Ocean City, NJ, means coming into contact with a bunch of weird characters like her loser brother, a young man renting her bedroom, and her mother's odd boyfriend who's either a compulsive liar or delusional about being in the CIA.
For all I know, this could be someone's actual life story, or a proper depiction of the type of weirdos who live in Ocean City - but I think I cracked the code on this film when it made another "Wizard of Oz" reference, using the song "Tin Man" by America as background music. (The song accurately points out that the Wizard's rewards to the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion were merely symbolic, they already possessed the desired brain, heart and courage.) Imogene's quest to get to NYC with two odd companions started to closely resemble Dorothy's trip down the yellow brick road, at least to me. The young male singer with the car represented the Scarecrow (he went to Yale, so he's got "brains"), and her shy brother was a combination of the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man (he invented this weird metal armor, like a crab shell, that he can hide in).
Remember how Dorothy's companions were played by the same actors as the three farmhands in the Kansas scenes? The actress who played the Wicked Witch also played Miss Gulch, and the actor who played the Wizard (and several other characters in Oz) played Professor Marvel. That's all fine, whether you believe Dorothy's trip to Oz was a real trip or a dream - but then who was Glinda, the Good Witch? Why didn't she have an analog in the Kansas framing scenes?
I think there's a reason for this - perhaps she represents Dorothy's (late) mother. Might Dorothy not remember her or imagine her as the most good, helpful being possible? Another theory then suggests that Professor Marvel is a stand-in for Dorothy's father, either as a symbolic figure or perhaps even her real father, who left Dorothy's mother for a life on the road as a traveling psychic. So Dorothy's dream about traveling to Emerald City to see the Wizard can be interpreted as the story of a young girl seeking out her father, who abandoned her, guided by the memory of her mother.
They sort of hinted at this in that recent "Oz the Great and Powerful" film, where the same actress who played Glinda also played Annie Gale, who had a romance with...wait for it...the guy who becomes the Wizard! Sure, she goes on to marry John Gale, but maybe it's not too far of a stretch to think that she might have been pregnant before marrying John Gale, which would kind of make the Wizard Dorothy's biological father, right?
I'll try to research this interpretation, but Wikipedia does mention a scene cut from "The Wizard of Oz" that implied a future romance between Dorothy and Hunk, the farmhand. Remember, she did tell the Scarecrow, "I think I'll miss you most of all." This would seem to also support the connection between "Girl Most Likely" and "The Wizard of Oz", because Imogene has a romance with the Scarecrow analog - and her best friend fits nicely into the Wicked Witch role. Maybe I'm just making connections where there are none, though.
Also starring Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Anchorman 2"), Annette Bening (last seen in "Postcards From the Edge"), Matt Dillon (last seen in "Armored"), Darren Criss, Christopher Fitzgerald, Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "Comic Book Villains"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "Moonrise Kingdom"), Brian Petsos, June Diane Raphael.
RATING: 5 out of 10 glitter tattoos
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