As a lifelong Jeopardy! fan, I was primed to be charmed by Quiz Lady. But it’s also true this wasn’t a necessary condition for me to be won over by a movie that is terribly sweet, even while being highly imperfect: a movie that falters when it gets too loud, but that truly shines when its humor gets quieter.
Awkwafina and Sandra Oh play sisters with drastically opposite personalities—Awkwafina’s Anne has an extreme level of social anxiety, and she mostly just counts the hours until she can watch her favorite quiz show each night, a show she hasn’t missed in 20 years. Sandra Oh plays Jenny, a wild spirit with little direction who exasperates her sister.
The movie hits the story beats you’d expect, meaning the sisters’ mother’s bookie shows up to collect a debt and kidnaps Anne’s ancient pug Linguine, forcing Jenny to scheme out a way to get Anne onto the quiz show to win the money to get the dog back. You know, normal stuff. Some of the gags are unnecessarily aggressive or cartoonish or even violent, and I don’t really understand why—they seem out of place when much of the more subtle humor is laugh-out-loud funny, and they sometimes even take us off track by winding us down a road that doesn’t really lead anywhere interesting. Surprisingly, the most restrained performance in the film comes from Will Ferrell, who plays the game show host, and is as funny as he’s been in years, primarily because of that restraint.
Whatever Quiz Lady’s faults, though, they’re erased by Sandra Oh and Awkwafina, who even pull a few of those less successful comedy bits up to some level of respectability. And I’ll be darned if my heart wasn’t warmed by how the climax of the movie plays out, and I even got a little misty-eyed at a cameo near the end of the film, one that typically might seem a little cheap, but that has taken on a new resonance. I didn’t expect to be moved by a silly movie like this one, but sometimes pure talent wins out.
Quiz Lady is on Hulu.
