Feig: The Heat (2013)

Although Melissa McCarthy’s become something of a buzz-word over the last year or so, she hasn’t starred in a film since Bridesmaids that’s really played to her strengths. In part, that’s because she’s a great character actor, and great at riffing in particular, meaning that her best moments still tend to be stored away in corners of films headlined by other stars (her rant in This Is 40), or pockets of the internet (her Saturday Night Live sketches on YouTube). The Heat is probably the first film to really find a way around this bind, and its solution is elegant: cast McCarthy in a dramedy, rather than a straight comedy. As far as dramedies go, police buddy films are some of the most reliable, and so Paul Feig focuses his film on the rapport that ensues when FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is called in from New York to investigate a Boston drug ring on Detective Shannon Mullins’ (McCarthy) turf. Bullock is the perfect foil to McCarthy – the dramedic actress par excellence, she shines in roles in which she's supposed to be funny but isn't, or can't quite figure out the point of being funny, providing a perfect point of transition between McCarthy and the wider, dramatic scope of the film, which plays as a suspenseful, atmospheric Boston procedural. And if there is any feminist revision here, it’s of Boston itself – gone is the cloying, masculinist sincerity of Affleck auteurism, replaced with a spirited conviviality that structures Bullock and McCarthy’s rapport as a series of corners, or pockets, within which McCarthy’s riffing can elasticise, expand, bounce off every available surface. Gone, too, is the recent tendency to elegaically retourist Boston as working-class graveyard - in his own quite unpretentious way, Feig presents a city of corners, in a film that’s quite prescient and appreciative of the audience that dwells among its many location shots and extras.