With the United Kingdom thrown into chaos after last month’s Brexit vote—the pound plunged, Scotland suggested secession, the elites lost it—it’s reassuring to learn there’s one thing you can count on: Eddy and Patsy are still showing us that “politically correct” can be not just a way of speaking but a way of life.
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie hits U.S. theaters this weekend, 24 years after the original sitcom premiered on the BBC and introduced us to best-friends-forever Edina Monsoon and Patsy Stone. Eddy (played by Jennifer Saunders, who also created and wrote the series) is the owner of a high-powered PR firm who’s usually a bit vulgar and more than a bit inebriated as she chases her ever-dissipating youth. Patsy (Joanna Lumley) is an executive at a high-powered fashion magazine who’s usually a bit vulgar and more than a bit inebriated as she chases her ever-dissipating youth. Their over-the-top antics always contrast starkly with the steadiness of Saffron (Julia Sawalha), Eddy’s daughter but more of a mother to the harum-scarum pair.
Their first feature film finds the London ladies older but no wiser. Like many episodes of the sitcom, which found a devoted American audience when Comedy Central began broadcasting it in 1994, the movie begins in Eddy’s kitchen as she endures a hangover and Saffy’s disappointed glares. Patsy soon shows up and the friends begin to plot their next outrageous move.
This time, they’re facing a real crisis: Eddy’s alimony payments are about to be cut off, as her ex-husband needs the cash for his transgender transition. (The movie is very up-to-the-minute. The ladies find “Boris, 51,” when they troll Tinder, and Patsy tries to beat her addictions the new-fangled way. Well, sort of. When Saffy tries to kick her out of the kitchen for smoking, she responds, “I’m vaping!” Saffy snaps back, “No, you lit it. That’s a cigarette.”) How will they afford to keep themselves in Pucci and Bolly (as they refer to their favorite beverage, Bollinger champagne)?
The crisis becomes a catastrophe when their get-rich-quick plan backfires. As Eddy rushes up to Kate Moss (playing herself) at a party, eager to score her as a client before a rival does, she accidentally knocks the wafer-thin supermodel over the balcony and into the Thames. Kate goes missing, and the country—nay, the world—mourns. The friends become fugitives, taking Saffy’s 13-year-old daughter Lola (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness) with them to Cannes. (She’s the only one with a credit card that’s not maxed out.) They hope to reconnect on the French Riviera with one of Patsy’s (many) past loves, a playboy who can keep them in the life to which they’ve become accustomed. But there…
Ah, there’s no point in discussing more of the plot. It’s a little preposterous, and of course it’s not the point. The comedy and the characters are, and there are plenty of those—though both are far more pointed in concentrated, half-hour doses than over a 90-minute film. The movie lags at times, usually at the points where the plot must be advanced. Some of the show’s funniest scenes take place in Eddy’s kitchen, with nothing much happening—the movie’s stars are too hungover to do much more than verbally throw pointed barbs at their enemies, but those barbs are as hilariously outrageous as the women are. Those zingers are the best parts of the film, too.
Time has given writer Jennifer Saunders a lot more targets, and she takes advantage of them. It’s also given the show a lot of famous fans, and the list of cameo appearances here could take up the space of this review. The legendary Joan Collins; Sherlock‘s Mark Gatiss; Games of Thrones‘s Gwendoline Christie; designer Stella McCartney; Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm; Dame Edna; Saunders’ partner in comedy crime, Dawn French; and Rupert Murdoch’s new wife, Jerry Hall, to name just a few. (Rebel Wilson as an airline stewardess gets one of the best lines: Dealing with a difficult Eddy and Patsy on a plane, she grumbles, “I hate I have to be nice to transgendered people now.”)
There are a few sad, genuine moments amidst the unreal fun. Eddy and Patsy might be determined to relive their youths, every single day, but they find their youths aren’t always willing to relive them—especially the men, surrounded, if they’re rich, by a never-ending supply of actual youth. But Absolutely Fabulous was a series about willfully independent women, anyway. Lola’s father has given her a credit card but never makes an appearance. The focus is on the females, as it always has been, and their friendships and follies. Eddy comes to the realization, near the end, that her live-for-the-moment selfishness has harmed her relationships with her daughter and granddaughter.
Fortunately, she quickly forgets it. Seinfeld also helped prove that television characters don’t have to be likable to be compelling. They can be far more entertaining, in fact, when they constantly let loose doing and saying things of which the rest of us, too polite, can only dream. “When are you going to stop rolling through life wanting more and more?” Saffon plaintively asks Eddy. Fortunately for us, laughing from the sidelines, even decades of trouble—and a couple of international incidents—can’t dim Eddy’s and Patsy’s voracious lust for life.
