Sara Stewart

Sara Stewart

Movies

Melissa McCarthy’s road comedy, ‘Tammy,’ hits potholes

Tammy (Melissa McCarthy) is a likable mess with a chronic inability to get it together. So is “Tammy” — a collaboration between McCarthy, who co-writes with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed. It’s a shame, because McCarthy is great at playing the female schlub, and that nascent genre is in need of a good poster girl. But this pastiche of sitcomy episodes never gels into a plot.

When we first meet her, Tammy’s late for work at her depressing fast-food job because she’s just hit a deer with her depressing car. Things go downhill from there, including an altercation with her boss (Falcone) who fires her, in that specifically haughty manner of the near-powerless and angry about it.

After the final indignity of the day — discovering her husband (Nat Faxon) is cheating on her with a svelte blonde (Toni Collette) — Tammy has nothing left to lose, and hits the open road with her spitfire grandma, Pearl (Susan Sarandon, not really old enough for this part but enjoying herself). Pearl has a bunch of cash, a wild streak (she once had an affair with an Allman brother — “not Gregg”) and a problem with alcohol and pills that starts out funny and gets ugly.

Melissa McCarthy stars in “Tammy.”AP/Warner Bros. Pictures

It’s never clear why Tammy is so far off-track, which is part of the film’s problem. It’s hard to root for someone who seems reasonably aware yet reliably makes one bad call after another. The movie also has an odd amount of fun with Tammy’s general level of ignorance: She calls Mark Twain “Mark Twan,” and when Pearl references Neil Armstrong on the moon, Tammy’s response is, “On his bike?”

The duo stops off at a roadhouse, in one of several vague nods to “Thelma and Louise,” where Pearl meets a man (Gary Cole) with whom she’s soon making out in the back of her car, much to the chagrin of his son (Mark Duplass) and Tammy, who take a gradual liking to one another.

McCarthy does her swaggering sexual self-confidence thing, though here it’s thinly papered over a fragile soul. She’s actually at her best when the movie stops making her try so hard and lets her face relax into a captivating openness. But it doesn’t happen often enough.

Susan Sarandon and Melissa McCarthy in “Tammy.”AP/Warner Bros. Pictures

A couple of bad decisions later, the cash-strapped Tammy’s robbing a burger joint so she can bail Pearl out of jail. It’s one of several scenes that just feel tone-deaf and overly long, from McCarthy’s slo-mo gangsta rap moves beforehand (amusing, kinda, but wouldn’t you want to get in and out as fast as possible?) to her halting, guilty repartee with the cashiers.

Eventually, Tammy and Pearl, now fugitives, are aided by Pearl’s cousin (Kathy Bates), whose partner is played by Sandra Oh. I’ll say one thing for this movie: It passes the Bechdel Test (does it feature at least two women talking about something other than a man?) with flying colors, culminating in a lesbian Fourth of July extravaganza involving a torched Jet Ski and Sarandon flashing her breasts at the assembled Sapphic partygoers.

There’s no shortage of goodwill in “Tammy,” at its core an ode to the female underdog. Nor is there any dearth of star power (Allison Janney and Dan Aykroyd also briefly play Tammy’s parents). It just doesn’t hang together. McCarthy has a real facility with bizarre, awkward one-liners — it’s what made her such a scene-stealer in “Bridesmaids” — but it’s tough to stitch those together into a leading role. Tougher than Falcone and McCarthy bargained for, I imagine.