Support the Girls is a barely concealed double entendre of a title for a film set in an even less coy Hooters-style bar called Double Whammies. Every day, the waitresses — pretty girls in crop tops and cutoffs — serve beer and wings to the mostly male clientele, though Double Whammies insists it’s a family-friendly “mainstream” place.
Support the Girls, set in a Hooters-style bar, is an outstanding, quietly feminist comedy
Regina Hall leads a stellar cast in a startlingly wise movie about what many women face at work and at home.
Alissa Wilkinson covered film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.
“It’s like working at Chili’s or Applebees,” one of the veteran waitresses tells a new girl, “but the tips are way better.”
But Support the Girls is not at all the winkingly misogynist raunch-com for dudes that set-up might imply. Starting out as a workplace comedy featuring a sparkling female ensemble, the movie — set mostly over a single day — morphs into an affecting, startlingly insightful depiction of the bone-weary work of being a woman in a man’s world.
It’s a feminist movie, to be sure, but not a self-congratulatory one. It’s easy to imagine an optimistic, rah-rah girl-power version of Support the Girls, but this is decidedly not that. For a lot of women trying to just earn a living, Hollywood-style empowerment takes a back seat to staying employed and keeping everyone around them at work and at home happy, boyfriends and bosses alike.
The result is a film that rings bitingly true, but respects its audience enough to let them connect the dots themselves. It’s funny and smart, but never wields its insights like a badge of honor. If anything, it’s an apology to its own characters for what women like them encounter all the time — one that sometimes bares some wincingly sharp teeth.
Support the Girls takes place over one day, but it’s about a lot more than that day
Support the Girls is the most mature film yet from Andrew Bujalski, who cut his teeth with “mumblecore” films — low-budget indies about young people in which plot takes a backseat to improvised dialogue — like Funny Ha Ha in 2002 and and Mutual Appreciation in 2005. His later films, like 2015’s Results, have headed in a more accessible direction, but a sensibility that emphasizes character and dialogue over plot has stuck around.
Accordingly, there’s not much of a plot to Support the Girls, though plenty happens. Most of the film stretches over one day and focuses on Lisa (Regina Hall, in an outstanding performance), the longtime Double Whammies manager whose dependability extends far beyond the workplace.
Lisa is the backbone of Double Whammies, and also of Support the Girls. For many of the girls who work at the bar, Lisa is an almost motherly figure: She listens to their problems, offers advice, gently keeps them in line, and ferociously throws men out of the restaurant who disrespect the women who work there. Her boss (James Le Gros) obviously doesn’t give her nearly enough credit.
And Lisa’s day isn’t just filled with keeping customers happy. She has to call the cable company to fix the TV before the big fight is on that night. She needs to train new waitresses and warn friendly, bubbly Maci (Haley Lu Richardson) away from one customer. She haggles over schedules and looks after the son of a waitress, Danyelle (Shayna McHayle), whose child care plan falls through. She goes to see an apartment for her deeply depressed husband (Lawrence Varnado), from whom she’s separating. And along with the black staff, she tries to ignore their employer’s casual racism.
As the day wears on toward the big fight that evening — and the increased tips that will go along with it — the girls of Double Whammies navigate problems like Lisa’s, hoping to get to the end of the day and making the best of whatever situations they’re handed. Good humor (or backhanded wit) keeps them chugging along; the customers expect it, after all. But everyone, eventually, has a breaking point.
In Support the Girls, the girls have to support themselves
Lisa’s day is basically a living illustration of accruing a thousand mosquito bites: None of the small individual irritations will kill you, but the small indignities and problems quickly add up to become unbearable. The individual happenings aren’t as significant as the sense that Lisa is being punished for the very qualities that make her a stellar friend and manager: her capability, her cheerfulness, her responsibility. She should be grateful, it’s implied, and she definitely should not complain when people take advantage of her.
And that mentality, Support the Girls suggests, is what keeps a place like Double Whammies (or the identical chain restaurant moving in nearby, called “Mancave”) in business. Each of the women have their own set of similar issues, and they’re all trying to cope in their own ways. The movie gives them moments to triumph — but the day will still, when it’s all over, end on a melancholy note.
Bujalski’s touch is light, and Hall’s deeply empathetic performance alongside secondary characters like Richardson’s and McHayle’s makes the whole thing feel authentic; you could almost believe you were watching a documentary in some spots.
But the issues that structure the film are serious. Support the Girls acknowledges that casual sexual harassment is, for many young women working for tips, just an accepted part of the job, something to be accepted. It shows how some workplaces and corporations pride themselves on “diversity” initiatives while actually just doing the bare minimum to escape scrutiny for racial discrimination.
Being a working single mother, paying for medical care without adequate insurance, encountering stereotypes about black women, catering to the whims of a clientele that likes to see you suffer a little — all of this comes into the film.
Yet that’s not really the movie’s point. This isn’t an exposé or a screed or even a socially conscious neorealist film. These are just the realities of the workplace, like lots of others, and they’re the film’s setup. The real story of Support the Girls is that, in the end, the only people the girls can depend on for support is themselves.
And so, in the end, they do. “Girl power” is too strong a word, but the movie is cathartic all the same. The ways they support one another have little to do with performative feminism and everything to do with love. If they’re not going to be respected by the people around them, at least, in the end, they can do that for one another.
Support the Girls opens in limited theaters on August 24.
