The Female Brain is a comedy that looks at the real-life science behind a woman’s romantic impulses.
Science as source for comedy is certainly nothing new in movies. Steve Martin‘s comedy classic The Man With Two Brains for example, has some science. I mean … there are brains and they do talk about them. With Whitney Cummings‘ new film The Female Brain, it mixes better real science into the story of course, however, as a comedy and a satire, it is loaded with misfires, even with a clever premise.
Julia Brizendine (Cummings) is a neurologist and looks exactly as you’re picturing her: dressed in conservative pantsuits with hair pulled tight off her serious face. Recently, her marriage fell apart and since, has put all her efforts into researching the female brain and what makes it tick, especially how it differs from men. She’s helped by her spunky assistant Abby (Beanie Feldstein), who is basically her opposite. Her subjects are three couples. There’s Steven (Deon Cole) and Lisa (Sofia Vergara), a couple married for 12 years who have lost the spark; Lexi (Lucy Punch) and Adam (James Marsden), together for two years (or so, depending on who you talk to) who are obsessed with looking their best; and Zoe (Cecily Strong) and Greg (Blake Griffin), a freshly-married couple, she an independent businesswoman and he a pro basketballer. However, when test subject Kevin (Toby Kebbell) arrives on the scene, Julia begins to see things in a new light.
The myriad things that separate the genders is one of the great debates of humankind, shared across the most prestigious laboratory tables and work-a-day water coolers, and so Cummings story isn’t without some validity. Unlocking the key to understanding each other would seem paramount to making us a more compatible species, even if most of us get along just fine. The Female Brain starts with a sort of clever visual aid to define the locations and terminology for what exactly makes our brains different, presented like a sort of TED Talk speech that ends up seeping away from that approach as the story moves on. It begins like a documentary but devolves into a three-part romcom that loses most of its steam.
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What we get is a montage of relationship hurdles we’ve seen plenty of times before with both sides pontificating on what it means to them. These are broken by freeze frames where an X-Ray image of the person’s brain is superimposed on screen with various scribbles about what their reaction means and where it comes from. That’s kinda smart, but what happens is that the sciency fun eventually takes a backseat to the clichés, including a contrived moment when Julia meets Kevin that doesn’t really work, painting itself right into the corner it seems trying to avoid.
Either way, The Female Brain is a movie with too many ideas, trying to patch together a number of social jabs and stereotypes in delivering its broad message. With so many characters, most of whom who have little to really explore beyond the superficial (Crocs with socks is a thing here), the movie just doesn’t have any momentum. I liked the science stuff and appreciated the rudimentary play-by-play of some of the conflicts, and Strong is terrific, of course. There are few moments that do work well as the cast does what they can with the jokes, however, The Female Brain feels like a missed opportunity to truly make our differences funny but somehow matter.