Bette Midler Returns to What She Does Best in ‘The Fabulous Four’

Bleecker Street’s new comedy “ The Fabulous Four ” finds Bette Midler doing what she does best: broad comedy with a touch of poignancy peeking out from just beneath the surface.

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It’s a quality that characterizes many of Midler’s most memorable performances in films like “ The First Wives Club ,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” and “That Old Feeling,” and according to Midler, it’s been part of her approach since the beginning.

“When I worked live, starting from the time I was 19, I was very much aware of the melancholy underneath certain kinds of scenes,” Midler told IndieWire in a recent interview. “There’s a musical term for it: contrapuntal. ‘Miss M’ is loud and boisterous on the outside, but there’s an undercurrent of despair because it’s very hard to be a human being.”

In “The Fabulous Four,” Midler plays a widow who surprises her friends (played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, Susan Sarandon, and Megan Mullally) with the news that she’s getting married once again. When the friends convene in Key West to serve as bridesmaids, past resentments (like the fact that Midler’s character stole the love of Sarandon’s life and married him) reemerge alongside a series of cheerfully silly comic set pieces, like an inevitable trip to a male strip club and a parasailing excursion that goes awry. As orchestrated by director Jocelyn Moorhouse, the situations provide plenty of opportunities to luxuriate in Midler and her costars’ exuberance — they seem like they’re having a great time, and the feeling is infectious.

Midler confirms that a happy set is more and more a priority for her as she chooses her collaborators and projects. “I don’t like coming onto a set that has a cloud over it,” she said. “The hours are absolutely brutal, and sometimes, the physical situations are nuts. You’re standing there for hours with sand blowing in your face. Sometimes, I watch Peter O’Toole in ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ and I think, ‘How did he do that? Who’s going to sign up for that?'”

For Midler, working with Moorhouse, the Australian director of films like “The Dressmaker” and producer of the classic “Muriel’s Wedding,” was a strong draw. “I had never met her personally, but I’m a big fan. She’s compassionate, she has tremendous patience, and she really understands women. I called her to tell her how much I liked the script and her previous work, and I was ready to sign on.”

For Midler, the screenplay remains a key factor in choosing which roles to take. “The script has to be there,” she said. “If it isn’t, there’s no point. And if it’s a subject you’re not particularly interested in, you really shouldn’t get involved. What I look for is a combination of an empathetic director and a script that is solid. Not a script you’re going to rewrite on the day or improvise, but a script that’s so strong that, if you do improvise, you have something to fall back on.”

Midler says that her happiest experiences on sets have been with directors Mark Rydell (“The Rose,” “For the Boys”) and Paul Mazursky, whose “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” helped revive Midler’s screen career after the fiasco of 1982’s “Jinxed,” beginning a stretch of productivity during which she made one hit movie after another (“Outrageous Fortune,” “Ruthless People,” “Beaches”) for Disney’s Touchstone Pictures label.

“Nick Nolte, Richard Dreyfuss, and I were all happy to be working again because we came from beneath contempt,” Midler said. “We had all had a couple really bad patches when Disney decided they wanted to make adult pictures, and this was the first one they made. Everyone was really happy to have been rescued.”

While most of Midler’s Disney output in the 1980s and early 1990s was commercially successful, one of her most enduring films at the studio stumbled out of the gate.

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“I was very shocked that ‘Hocus Pocus’ didn’t work out at the time because it was so much fun to make,” Midler said. “It didn’t exactly die at the box office, but it didn’t take off either… it was just sort of middling. But somehow, when they put it on television, it found its audience, and the audience has only grown. And the three of us [Midler and costars Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker] had no idea for years. No one called us to say, ‘Guess what? You’re a hit.’ But 20 years after the fact, it came through to us through bits and pieces that something was going on.”

Midler and her costars would ultimately reunite for the straight-to-streaming Disney+ sequel “Hocus Pocus 2” in 2022 , which raises the question of whether there are other characters from her past that Midler would like to revisit.

She says that there has never been serious talk of a “First Wives Club” sequel , but that there were discussions between its three stars — Midler, Goldie Hawn, and Diane Keaton — about appearing onscreen as a trio again.

“We could never really crack the story,” Midler said, “and we didn’t really focus on it. They have big lives, and I had my daughter and my husband, so I wasn’t prepared to focus on it. But in a strange way, I am now — I have time on my hands, so I think it’s a possibility.”

Of all her roles, Midler is most interested in continuing the story of C.C. Bloom, the actress and singer she played in Garry Marshall’s 1988 “Beaches.”

“I would like to see what happened to C.C. because, as you age, your musical tastes change, and the songs that that character could sing now would be really kind of fabulous,” Midler said. “Great, great songs. And what kind of a career did she actually have? Did she get sick? Did she have children? Did she marry? Was it a good marriage? All of these things that make up a life. So yeah, I think about her a lot.”

“The Fabulous Four” opens in theaters on Friday, July 26.