Starring: Nia Vardalos, Toni Collette, David Duchovny

6 out of 10 stars

Trafficking in a number of gay issues without actually being, well, gay, Connie and Carla is pretty much My Big Fat Drag Queen Show – a cross-dressing comedy you can safely take your grandma to. Nia Vardalos' follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding appropriates a number of various stereotypically gay-friendly interests and mannerisms – drag, musicals, coming-out, family angst, fabulousness, etc – but uses them to decorate the movie much like paper streamers and bright balloons liven up a party (and not unlike the way she peppered Wedding with Greek-isms). Fortunately, the party Vardalos throws is kind of fun, thanks to her way with a gag and the stellar performance given by Toni Collette. This is no Some Like It Hot or Victor/Victoria – two movies which Connie and Carla desperately, almost sweatingly aspires to – but, following the cardinal rule of most soirees, it doesn't overstay its welcome. And trust me, everyone over 50 in your family will love it.

Taking a page – heck, a whole chapter – from Billy Wilder, Connie and Carla starts out with the titular Chicago gals (Vardalos and Collette) performing excruciating numbers from a variety of musicals to yawning airport crowds. Harboring dreams of vaguely far-off dinner theater fame but saddled with problematic boyfriends, the duo find their only fan in their boss, Frank – whose murder by a drug dealer they happen to witness no less than ten minutes into the movie. Frantic to escape certain death, they pack up their wigs, costumes and musical arrangements and head to where no dinner theater culture exists – Los Angeles, namely West Hollywood. Happening upon probably the most unglamorous gay bar you'll ever see in a film comedy, Connie comes up with the idea of parlaying their talents into drag queen fame – after all, who's ever seen a drag queen actually sing? Sooner than you can say "Life is a cabaret, old chum," they're the headliners at The Handlebar, and have picked up a coterie of fellow drag friends (led by Stephen Spinella, of the original Broadway production of Angels in America) for a gay old time. Complications enter the mix when their fame gets a little too well-known, their boyfriends pop up in L.A. (followed by the drug dealer and his henchman) and Connie falls for the brother of one of her newfound pals, a nice but uptight sort named Jeff (David Duchovny) who can't quite handle this whole men-dressing-as-women thing.

Despite a game cast and an able director (Emmy winner Michael Lembeck), this is Vardalos' movie all the way, even more so than My Big Fat Greek Wedding. All the minuses from that movie – stale humor, jokes that pretty much tell themselves, ethnic humor (well, substitute "gay" for "Greek" this time around), issues of conflict reduced to their most basic – are here in spades. Then again, so are the pluses, for despite her destiny to be a sitcom-friendly writer-cum-actress, Vardalos has well-timed and well-honed sense of humor that you'd be hard-pressed not to laugh along with. Yes, these are the most unimaginative drag queens you can imagine, but Vardalos fills their lipsticked mouths with peppy bon-mots and a true affection for anyone who loves a good musical. The situations are as schematically laid out as a board game, but the journey getting from point A to point B is a wry and surprisingly enjoyable amount of fun.

And here, Vardalos even gets to one-up her previous movie by pairing herself with an incomparable co-star in Collette. Having been shackled by a number of heavily dramatic roles of late – The Hours, About a Boy, The Sixth Sense to name the most famous – Collette finally, finally gets to let loose again with the raucous comedic skills she so ably demonstrated in Muriel's Wedding ten (ten!) years ago. Playing a perfectly awkward Midwestern girl, Collette's Carla blooms under the flounces and spangles of being a drag queen (more so than Vardalos' Connie ever does) and her bug eyes and buck teeth serve her well in her new female impersonator incarnation. In fact, Collette is so good and so nuanced one's tempted to think that scenes of hers were cut in favor of the star's, as Carla leaves the screen for a good chunk of the film and returns more fabulous than ever while Connie pursues bland milquetoast Jeff.

And it's in the concept of Jeff, the WASP-y love interest much like John Corbett in Wedding, where Connie and Carla gets bogged down. Whereas Corbett's Ian was a bit too much of an understanding dreamboat – taking in his fiancee's family with nary a blink – Duchovny's Jeff is just the opposite, apparently one of the few Los Angelenos not to have ever seen Will & Grace or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Flummoxed by his brother's homosexuality, and abhorred of drag queens to a degree that hasn't been seen since pre-Stonewall days, Jeff is a far distant cousin from James Garner's King Marchand in Victor/Victoria, totally stymied by his attraction to a seemingly gay man. Unlike Garner, whose performance walked a wonderfully farcical line, Duchovny plays up the itchier sides of homosexual panic to such a degree that you're ready to chuck him off the screen – until you remember that, yes, he once played cross-dresser (and a fabulous one) on Twin Peaks, and his quirks as Fox Mulder would make any of the L.A. queens he meets blanch underneath their pancake base. It's only grudgingly that the audience allows him to stay around as the love reward for all of Vardalos' hard work.

In the end, it's either your love, hatred or tolerance of musicals that will allow you to warm to Connie and Carla or freeze it out like an unwelcome dinner guest. The perfect litmus test is whether or not you'd be tickled pink to see Debbie Reynolds in a cameo, playing herself as a kind of mother hen to Vardalos and Collette's drag incarnations. And like one of Reynolds' most famous roles, Connie and Carla is quite unsinkable, no matter how obvious and unimaginative it is at times. After all, sometimes life actually is a cabaret!