With writer-director Paul Feig’s glossy, globetrotting spoof “Spy,” we reach a new and more comfortable middle zone in the strange, double-edged phenomenon of Melissa McCarthy’s movie-star career. McCarthy is keenly aware that some people will always view her as a joke – a brash, trash-talking but essentially sexless person who resembles Santa Claus’ wife (as Jason Statham’s hard-boiled spook character observes in this movie). This may be more than balanced out, to be sure, by those in the audience who identify with her and root for her joyously. Personally, I’ve often found her comic persona overly aggressive, cranked to 11 too much of the time, but that’s a different question from her cultural significance. McCarthy’s seemingly unlikely rise to stardom is more important than any of her individual projects; it belongs to a much broader cultural pattern of tolerance and acceptance that encompasses same-sex matrimony and “Modern Family” and Caitlyn Jenner and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Source: salon.com