Avis des critiques

McCarthy and first-time director Ben Falcone cannot negotiate the film's terrain as smoothly as they should have, and this is probably because Tammy evolved in the course of making it. What starts out as a standard 90-minute Hollywood gag machine becomes a richer, more coherent character study. Industry imperatives being what they are, McCarthy and Falcone could hardly ask to thin out the broad humor.

The greatest aspect of her performance in Tammy is the range of dynamics, the subtle switches between crabby petulance and legitimate trauma which help the film to pack a considerable emotional wallop. Reader, this critic shed a lone tear at one of her line readings during the opening contextual salvo, in which Tammy goes through that conventional comic arc of losing everything in her life in surreally swift succession.

Like a classic road comedy, this tends to drift from scene to scene rather than adhere to a strict plot; the movie revolves mostly around McCarthy, hilarious in her best performance to date. She cowrote the script with her husband, Ben Falcone, providing her character with a nuance absent from her other starring roles; she shows a more dramatic side, and not every joke is predicated on her weight.

The movie's double identity is its charm and its curse. Without its sociological setup, its consistent comedic failings would be irredeemable; but its comedic failings turn its unusual and original perspective into a burden. McCarthy and Falcone have a clear sense of what they want to say, but Falcone's directorial perspective is vague.

They have little feel for the technical side of filmmaking... Most shots seem held for a beat too long or too short, wreaking havoc with the comic rhythm. Nonetheless, McCarthy and Falcone's attempts to make Tammy more flesh-and-blood than a figure of fun are often poignant, as in a scene in which our down-and-out heroine gets a tough talking-to from guest star Kathy Bates... For all its failings and flailings, there's plenty to admire in this oddball star vehicle.

The jokes about Tammy's eating habits, her appetite for burgers, pies and doughnuts, aren't especially funny and, after a while, register as both tedious and borderline desperate. They also suggest that Ms. McCarthy, and perhaps her collaborators, haven't yet found a way for her to be completely comfortable in her own skin on screen.

Clocking in at a slight 96 minutes, Ben Falcone's film is an almost plotless doodle, with low stakes made even lower thanks to the bratty passivity of its titular antiheroine. Its laugh count is notably small as well, though to be fair, Falcone, who co-wrote the script with McCarthy, seems more interested in drama than comedy once the obligatory slapstick set pieces that dominate the first half of the film are out of the way.