Amy Poehler's new directorial venture Wine Country is about a group of women — including comedy superstars Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer — who head to Napa to celebrate the 50th birthday of their friend. While plenty of comedies, such as The Hangover, centre on a celebration gone awry, the fact that this one stars a group of women instead of men eager for a holiday means that this version of the wild getaway trip plays out quite differently.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the women of Wine Country revealed exactly why this getaway trip isn't much like the Las Vegas-set bachelor movie The Hangover, in which the cast partied their way into shenanigans involving a secret wedding to a stripper, a hangout with Mike Tyson, and one inadvertent kidnapping.
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After rejecting her husband's theory that Wine Country was The Hangover but "with women," star Ana Gasteyer told Vanity Fair that it was a different beast entirely. Wine Country is "a lost weekend so much as a found weekend." (Which probably means no one is leaving the strip club with a baby.)
As for Poehler, there’s one thing that keeps Wine Country away from similar movies with men at the centre. Specifically? The women of Wine Country are a bit more mature, even when going through their own crises.
"The movie’s not about ladies who can’t act their age," Poehler told Vanity Fair. "A man’s ‘midlife crisis’ is: gets a fancy car, fucks somebody too young for him, has a crazy weekend, and realizes what he’s got. I don’t even know what the female version of that is."
According to Vanity Fair, Wine Country passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, which should come as no surprise to anyone who follows Poehler's work. She most recently produced Netflix's Russian Doll, a surprisingly complex examination of a woman (Natasha Lyonne) stuck in a time loop on her birthday.
"The women I know in their 40s and 50s are incredibly interesting, funny, accomplished, doing a million things, and there’s a lot of rich stories to tell there that don’t involve loss or fear of being left," Poehler told Vanity Fair of why she decided to kick things off with (yet another) birthday.
While Wine Country may provide Hangover-sized laughs, how the women of Wine Country handle the drama of their weekend getaway sounds like something we haven't seen before.
Wine Country will be released on Netflix later this year