There’s an undeniable appeal in Support the Girls. The film focuses on people who work in a place that the average person would very likely never wish to spend much time in; even so, it manages to make their ordinary difficulties seem remarkably familiar. Although The Double Whammies sports bar is centred on scantily clad waitresses, huge portions of food and a constant flow of loud male customers, Andrew Bujalski is much more concerned with the people who wear the uniforms than with the business.

In the middle is Lisa, portrayed by Regina Hall, who appears to have taken on the roles of mother, advisor, guardian, and, at times, saviour for everyone around her. She is aware of her staff’s problems, cares about their relationships, provides financial support, and makes an effort to keep them away from the more unpleasant parts of the job. The irony is that no one seems to be particularly interested in looking after Lisa.

Hall is excellent, providing Lisa with a warmth that might easily have come across as cloying but instead comes across as genuine. She displays a mildly exhausted enthusiasm, typical of someone who has, for years, told herself that everything will be all right, since somebody has to. Haley Lu Richardson and Dylan Gelula are equally good, and Shayna McHayle makes an impression as Danyelle, another employee dealing with difficulties outside of work.

The film is mostly set over a single day, and Bujalski takes advantage of this format by stacking one annoyance after another. It features troublesome customers, an attempted robbery, disagreements among employees, problems in people’s relationships, a sporting event that becomes increasingly important, and the continual fear of losing business to a competitor. Rather than having a traditional plot, it is more a collection of misfortunes. It is both the film’s strength and its weakness.

There’s a most genuine quality to the way Support the Girls lets conversations drift and situations unfold without always driving them toward a punchline or a dramatic revelation; it possesses the loose and observational character typical of Bujalski’s earlier films, and some of the best moments are merely those of watching the women talk to each other.

Yet the same naturalistic approach sometimes causes the film to seem frustratingly aimless. Although the running time of 93 minutes doesn’t make it very long, there are sections where the story seems to go around the same ideas without really developing them. The film certainly has some points to make regarding exploitation, gender, class and workplace loyalty, but it is usually more effective when those ideas arise naturally rather than being highlighted.

The title ends up being more complex than the slogan at first sight. Although Lisa does support the girls, the film quietly raises the question of who will support her when that goodwill has disappeared. At this point, Hall’s performance becomes especially significant, as she gives Lisa’s optimism the effect of being less naive and more like a coping mechanism.

Support the Girls has many reasons to recommend it, especially regarding the performances and the way it portrays ordinary working people; it is funny without being extremely hilarious, moving without becoming sentimental, and angry without turning into a lecture.

For me, however, it never actually attains the emotional or comic peak that it sometimes promises. It is a pleasant, well-acted small film that shows genuine affection for its characters, but one that, in the end, seems more like a really good day at work than a great film about a single subject.

Similar Films

• Waiting… (2005)
• The Florida Project (2017)
• Hustlers (2019)

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