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TAMMY

"Crude Distractions"

What You Need To Know:

TAMMY is a raucous comedy starring the popular Melissa McCarthy. She plays a clueless, obese female loser named Tammy. In one day, Tammy ruins her car, gets fired from her dead-end fast food job and discovers her husband is having an affair with their next-door neighbor. Frustrated with her life, Tammy declares she’s leaving her husband and needs to borrow her grandmother Pearl’s car to leave town and start over. Pearl also wants to escape her own dead-end life, so the two head off together. The problem is that Pearl is a hopeless alcoholic. Also, Tammy and Pearl are a disaster with everyone they meet. Will Tammy and Pearl face up to their personal problems?

TAMMY sounds like more fun than it actually is. It has some chuckles and sweet emotional moments, but it’s only funny in fits and starts. Making matters worse, it has abundant foul language that’s pervasive and other crude elements, including some overt homosexual characters. Eventually, Tammy and her grandmother face up to their problems, but the frequent obscenities and homosexual characters detract from TAMMY’S more positive qualities.

Content:

(PaPaPa, HoHo, BB, C, LLL, V, SS, AA, DD, MMM) Very strong mixed pagan worldview in comedy about a fat woman loser who flees her small town life with her alcoholic grandmother in an attempt to improve their lives, with strong pro-homosexual scenes yet also some strong moral resolutions at the end that include a degree of repentance; more than 130 obscenities and profanities and some obscene gestures; light violence in a couple brief arguments and fight scenes, with comic heroine is shoved and shoves people back, and a comically intended fight between comic heroine and a teenage couple who fight her for control of a case of beer heroine’s grandmother illegally buys for them, plus car slams into deer, which appears to survive; strong sexual content overall includes issues of implied adultery, comic heroine comes home to find her husband having a romantic dinner with their neighbor, heroine leaves husband and eventually finds another man, crude dialogue, grandmother sleeps with married man, and comic heroine and her grandmother visit one of her grandmother’s cousins, who is a lesbian and holds a party where dozens of lesbians dance, which is played for laughs but nonetheless feels unnecessary to the main plot and appears to be merely pushing the agenda that homosexuality is everywhere, even among Middle America’s senior citizens; no nudity; grandmother is an alcoholic and is seen guzzling all forms of alcoholic drinks throughout much of the movie, which leads to reckless behavior, but she eventually vows to stop drinking; no smoking but grandmother is jailed for being in illegal possession of numerous prescription pills; and, heroine gets uncontrollably angry, heroine deliberately ruins food in fast food restaurant after being fired, as well as stealing and robbery.

More Detail:

TAMMY is a comedy about a fat woman loser who flees her small town life with her alcoholic grandmother in an attempt to improve their lives. TAMMY has a very strong mixed pagan worldview with some strong homosexual content, abundant foul language and strong moral resolutions to a couple of major plot problems.

The movie follows the story of a clueless and obese female loser named Tammy (Melissa McCarthy), who works in a dead-end fast-food restaurant. In one day, she ruins her car, gets fired from her job and discovers her husband is having an affair with their next-door neighbor.

Frustrated with her life, Tammy declares she’s leaving her husband and needs to borrow the car of her grandmother Pearl (Susan Sarandon), in order to leave town for a big city to start over. Pearl also wants to escape her own dead-end life, so the two head off together. The problem is that Pearl is a hopeless alcoholic. Also, Tammy and Pearl are a disaster with everyone they meet.

That is, except for when Tammy meets a sweet guy named Bobby (Mark Duplass), whose married father (Gary Cole) has a one-night stand with Pearl. When Tammy and Pearl are arrested, Tammy is released first and tries to bail out Pearl by robbing a branch of her former fast-food employer of the $1,600 they need.

As Tammy and Pearl go on the run, Tammy and Bobby start a new romance even as they are surrounded by Tammy’s lesbian aunt Lenore (Kathy Bates) and a houseful of their lesbian friends having a party. Ultimately, Tammy and Pearl face up to their problems and do some redemptive things to truly change their lives for the better.

TAMMY sounds like more fun than it actually is. That may be because McCarthy relies on her husband, Ben Falcone, to co-write with her and direct the movie, though he has no prior feature-film credits to his name. One major moral drawback is the pointless inclusion of the lesbian scenes, which seem to be there just to make viewers believe that openly homosexual communities are everywhere, even in rural America.

Aesthetically, the movie is funny in fits and starts, particularly when Tammy gets angry. McCarthy is a master of physical comedy and becoming frustrated in funny ways. Too much of the movie, however, drifts along without enough action or emotion taking place, leaving the audience to stare at the screen in boredom.

That said, the movie’s depiction of troubled people in denial is sometimes emotionally affecting. Even so, TAMMY undercuts itself on that front with its jumpy, awkward attempts to mix humor and heart.

(SPOILER ALERT) The movie does score some moral points in the end. Both Tammy’s thievery and Pearl’s reckless behavior are resolved in a moral fashion. Tammy finally seems to find true happiness, though divorced from her faithless husband.

All told, TAMMY has some chuckles and some sweet emotional moments, but its very frequent obscenity and overt homosexual characters detract from its positive qualities. The foul language is frequent, strong and excessive.