The New Cult Canon: 'Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar'

“Thanks so much for the, um, weird time” — Jamie Dornan, Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar

“Guilty” was the second single on Barbra Streisand’s 1980 album of the same name, which so heavily featured Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb as a producer, writer, and singer that he’s on the cover, wrapping Streisand in tight embrace. Gibb contributed backup vocals to most of the songs, including the chart-topping first single, “Woman in Love,” but he’s her duet partner on “Guilty,” and his brothers, Robin and Maurice, co-wrote it with him. If you spent any time in the ’80s in the backseat of a station wagon, when adult contemporary songs shared airspace with your mother’s cigarette smoke—surely it wasn’t just me?—then you probably have some vague memory of the track, which was successful enough to pop up on Streisand and Bee Gees hit compilations. But it’s an appealing love song regardless, about a romance that should be allowed to thrive without outside pressure or judgment. (Please enjoy this live clip in which Gibb appears halfway through out of the brush, as if some sort of jungle cat.) 

Why is this song the first thing we hear in Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s divinely ridiculous day-glo comedy Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar? And why is it being lip-synched by a prepubescent paperboy on his route? And why does that same paperboy stop at a hollowed-out tree in the middle of a field that opens up to reveal an elevator that leads to a secret lair runs by an evil genius who likes to drink a “suicide” of fountain sodas that includes traditional cola, diet cola, lemon-lime spritz, root beer, orange soda, and just a splash of lemon-infused iced tea? 

The answers to these seemingly unanswerable questions actually help account for the film’s giddy appeal: 1. Why not? If this improvisational experiment can get started with a random love duet from 40 years ago, then it’s a signal to the audience that anything goes. 2. There’s something about that song that captures the essence of Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig), a pair of divorcees from small-town Nebraska with feathered hair and culottes who may live in the modern world but seem untouched by it, as if they were preserved in amber around the same time Streisand and Gibb were immersing middle-aged couples in a warm vocal bath. It’s a tone-setter for a comedy that’s willing to go far afield for laughs while channeling a certain timeless Midwestern spirit, embodied by two women who defy trends they don’t even know exist. 

Barb & Star is about two best friends who get embroiled in the vengeful scheme of a Dr. Evil-like antagonist while vacationing at a tacky Gulf Coast resort, but Wiig and Mumolo do their best to keep that plot collision at bay until absolutely necessary. The true pleasure of the film lies in the chemistry between the two actresses, who lose themselves in conversational tangents that could go on forever if reality didn’t puncture them every once in a while. Their first scene patches together a montage of conversational fragments on hygiene in the 1800s (“Yellow teeth was just the regular color of teeth”), their secret crushes on the mustachioed Pringles logo and Mr. Peanut, and Star’s wistful observation that “all of the raccoons in the world are sleeping right now”—each punctuated by small movements to the beat of Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.” They’re brought back to earth by a couple that wants to buy the couch they’re sitting on, because they’re saleswomen at a furniture store. The thought of selling the floor model is unthinkable to Barb, however, who reminisces about the time when Star told her about her caramel addiction in that very spot.