Imagine how exhausting it would be to be a woman working at Hooters. Now imagine how much worse it would be to be the woman managing a knock-off version of Hooters called Double Whammies that sits just off a Texas highway. That is the role Regina Hall plays in the new film Support the Girls. Written and directed by Anderson Bujalski, it follows Hall’s character Lisa, a genuinely good person slowly being worn down by a job that feels designed to keep her from protecting her colleagues from the men who pay to leer at them.
Hall has often been too good for the roles she’s been given, but Support the Girls lets her flex her muscles in a way we rarely see. Lisa is caring and kind, but there’s a melancholy to her that’s at its most intense when the film starts: with Lisa crying in her car before work. We don’t understand why she would be so sad then, but the longer we see what a normal work day looks like for her, the more we realize how much her job entails.
She has to throw out customers when they get aggressive, but she has to placate those same customers when the cable goes out right before a big game. The problems are small, but Hall makes it feel like Lisa has the weight of the world on her shoulders and it’s perhaps no surprise to learn that Lisa’s commitment to the job means her home-life suffers. Her husband is icy when we finally meet him and we learn why when we realize that the apartment someone keeps calling Lisa about is just for him.
While it’s sad to see such a good woman feel so unsupported and possibly unloved, it also becomes clear that Lisa’s true vocation is protecting her mostly female coworkers. Each Double Whammies girl has a struggle. Danyelle (Shayna McHayle) is underemployed and bored in a job she hates but can’t leave. Maci (Haley Lu Richardson) is so innocent and loving that it seems like only a matter of time before the world destroys her. The struggle they all share, though, is dealing with the men around them.
Though Lisa begins the film by claiming that Double Whammies is a family restaurant, it quickly becomes obvious that she’s either in denial or putting on a brave face. Perhaps except for Lea DeLaria’s Bobo, even the nicest customers seem to view the girls as objects for their viewing pleasure, constantly pursued even when there’s no chance of victory. Even worse are the one-time customers who insult a waitress or get a little too handsy. And while Lisa may insist that Double Whammies isn’t that kind of establishment, it’s a battle we realize she fights alone the second the restaurant’s owner, Ben Cubby (James Le Gros), shows up.
Cubby will be familiar to anyone who’s ever worked under the kind of Napoleon complex-driven person who takes joy in wielding their limited power over other people. Even Lisa, so confident in front of a big, rude, biker guy fears Cubby on some level and it’s easy to understand why. Not only does he constantly threaten to fire her, but he basically kidnaps her at one point in the film. It’s no wonder then that Lisa cries before work and it’s also no wonder that she and the other girls eventually start to push back.
Though Bujalski’s aspirations are perhaps not that grand, it’s easy to see Support the Girls as some sort of metaphor for what it’s like to be a woman at this moment in history. After lifetimes of navigating male desire and male power, Lisa, a truly competent woman who’s the unappreciated reason things actually work, finally decides to take control of her own life and the girls rebel with her. There’s catharsis in that narrative to be sure, but it’s actually the way the film appreciates the small ways women support each other that gives it such impact. It may be a man’s world, but all women have to do is band together and fight to change it.
Rating: 9.5/10
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