Kristen Bell is either the best or worst wedding guest. It depends where you stand on Irish goodbyes.
“I’m a big believer in going, waving, having a good time for about an hour or two, and then just politely sliding out,” says Bell, 42. “Saying goodbye to the partners getting married is like the worst thing you can do. No one wants to say goodbye at a party. If you’re leaving, leave me out of it.”
Count her character Alice in “The People We Hate at the Wedding” (streaming Friday on Amazon Prime), though, as one of the worst guests. Insecure? Check. Brawls with her lover’s wife? Check. Goes to jail? Check.
“I haven’t been to any weddings that had any high level of drama, unfortunately,” Bell says.
And that’s just the tip of the high jinks iceberg in the new ensemble comedy, based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Grant Ginder. It also stars Ben Platt as Alice’s brother, Paul, and Allison Janney as their mother Donna. The three jet off to London for the wedding of Alice and Paul’s estranged half-sister Eloise (Cynthia Addai-Robinson). Drama quickly ensues as secrets and resentments bubble up across the pond.
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“People at weddings are either in two places,” says director Claire Scanlon (“Set It Up”). “They’re really happy, comfortable in their own skin and ready to have a good time and appreciate two people in love getting married. Or you’re in a place where you’re the opposite of comfortable in your own skin and you’re feeling miserable. And you’re using this as another tick mark of how you’re behind all your peers.”
Check off Alice as one of the miserable ones for most of this movie. Viewers will have trouble keeping up with how many glasses of wine she drank – not unlike Bell’s character Anna in her Netflix miniseries “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window.”
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“Alice was drinking to calm herself and soothe herself, whereas characters such as Anna were drinking for hydration,” she quips.
Such misery is bound to happen when self-doubt creeps in. “When you have an event on display from two people in your circle, in your community circle, if your life is not going the way you think it should, it is virtually impossible to stay out of the headspace of comparison,” Bell says. “Therefore, you cannot be on your best behavior surrounding that person’s event because you’re doing nothing but comparing and feeling bad about yourself.”
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Eloise and Alice could learn a lesson or two about sisterhood from one of Bell’s other sister-driven films, “Frozen,” starring animated princesses Anna and Elsa.
“What I think could be learned from Anna and Elsa’s relationship is you can choose to support and love someone through their bad choices,” Bell says. “You can choose to fight for someone. The problem that Eloise and Alice are having is a miscommunication, which so often happens in families.”
The movie comes out just in time for Thanksgiving – appropriate for any and all messy family gatherings. “There’s no such thing as not a dysfunctional family,” Scanlon says. “We all know what a dysfunctional family is and probably most of us come from one to some extent.”
Both Bell and Scanlon identify with Janney’s Donna most, someone who desperately wants her children to be together and happy like when they were kids. But she’s also thrilled to be around them at all.
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“Even if that means maybe being ever-so-slightly quixotic about it, just thinking it’s going to go off without a hitch,” Bell says. “She’s an idealist that is forced to face a lot of family issues and does it with grace because she’s there for her kids. And she’s still their rock, even when she has to give them tough love.”
Consider Bell the fiercest advocate for her children (Lincoln, 9, and Delta, 7, with husband Dax Shepard) too: “I would be willing to fight anyone for my child, and I’d also be willing to bite them.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kristen Bell talks ‘People We Hate at the Wedding,’ her Amazon film
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