Miller, 42, is one of those almost comically hyphenated professionals, though the painter-actress-screenwriter-novelist-director does tend to wear only two of her hats at one time — three if you count the time she adapted and directed her second film, the 2002 Sundance Grand Jury winner “Personal Velocity,” from her own novel. At least her varied vocations obscure her also being a multi-hyphenate celebrity relation: the daughter of Arthur Miller and his wife of 40 years, the late photographer Inge Morath, and the wife of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Day-Lewis stars in “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” as Jack Slavin, a terminally ill father who has raised his 16-year-old daughter Rose (Camilla Belle) alone on an abandoned island commune. As he prepares to die, Jack invites his girlfriend (Catherine Keener) and her sons to move into his and Rose’s utopia, and Rose’s jealous devotion to Jack becomes fierce, dangerous and, yes, downright incestuous.

Miller was born in 1962, the year her father’s second wife, Marilyn Monroe, died. Her parents had met on the set of Monroe’s last film, the Arthur Miller-penned “Misfits,” where Morath was a still photographer and he was in the final throes of his marriage. The family lived in Roxbury, Conn., in what Miller said was “then real country” — though it was also home to artists like her parents and sculptor Alexander Calder. “I remember the bulldozers as they made their ineluctable advance across the landscape,” she said. “I would weep, really cry, when I saw a house go up.”

Some of that grief is reborn on-screen in Jack Slavin, a rigid conservationist, though Miller said her interest in commune life came from memories of her half-brother, 16 years her senior, who “experienced the ’60s in a very total way.” When she was a child, Miller visited her brother on the commune where he lived, and “idealized that way of life.” She noted that while she pulled her inspiration for Jack from the leftist radicalism of the 1960s, she’s not sure that she hasn’t created a very conservative hero. “You have people who are radical Christians, all the way on the other side, who [like Jack] don’t want their children to have contact with the outside world,” she said.

Miller’s ever evolving career began with a voracious childhood appetite for the written word. She remembered being assigned “Moby Dick” when she was 11 while the rest of the class read “Little Women.” “I was really turned on by it in every way,” she said of the Melville novel. “It’s a story an 11-year-old kid would be interested in. It’s not like [the teacher] gave me ‘The Golden Bowl’ or something.” Miller said she was later influenced by Russian writers — Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Gogol — because “there’s something about their sensibility that I find close to my own. They clearly capture rapidly fluctuating emotion in a beautiful way.” During a post-college stint as an actress — she had parts in “Regarding Henry” and “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” — she toured in Peter Brook’s 1988 production of “The Cherry Orchard,” and she thinks that if a viewer were looking for Chekhov in her new film, they might find it. “There’s a sort of lightness to the sadness,” she said.

Miller majored in painting at Yale and exhibited her work after graduation. “Painting was a wonderful job for me,” she said. “It was very physical and quiet and contemplative.” But, she said, “the part of me that’s a story-teller wasn’t satisfied.” So she started making movies, though oddly, they did not tell stories. Her early cinematic projects were “totally non-narrative, based on my dreams, very idiosyncratic; they were on loops and I showed them embedded in the wall or in triptychs.” The lasting influence of this period — when Miller was merging painting with film — is evident in the films she’s making now: “Personal Velocity” contains lengthy montages of still photos, and “Jack and Rose” opens with a spiraling shot of a flower.

Miller likes her films to surprise viewers, to “get under people’s skins.” When I told her that I found the relationship between Jack and Rose repellent in part because the chemistry between 46-year-old Day-Lewis and 16-year-old Camilla Belle was so strong that it was easy to root for the father and daughter characters to get it on, she said, “That’s exactly what [the movie] is supposed to do. You’re invited to lose your balance.”

Despite the disconcertingly surreal effects of her work, Miller said she is much more tethered to reality now that she’s a mother. “Dreams and art, that was my life,” she said of her younger self. “I was interested in reverie. I wasn’t needed by anyone.” Giving birth, she said, catapulted her back to this planet. “I think that I became more earthy, less ethereal. Because it was all about blood and flesh and reality.” Plus, she said, “the expectation of being needed is ultimately extremely satisfying.”

Miller claimed that she had recently heard there were fewer female film directors than there were women in any other profession, including “welding and science.” Her identity as a woman has often eclipsed her identity as a professional, she said: “Just once I’d like to be invited to be on a panel with a man on it. I wish there could be some acknowledgment that women are part of the larger tradition of filmmaking and not ghettoized all the time.” Miller routinely works with a group of women she described as being “like sisters” to her, including cinematographer Ellen Kuras, producer Lemore Syvan, casting director Cindy Tolan and editor Sabine Hoffman. “I guess having them around makes me understand better why men hire men,” she said. “It’s just easier with your own sex; you understand each other better.” But, she was clear, “I like working with men. My production designer Mark Ricker is a man. I would be open to having a man cut one of my films.”

“The Ballad of Jack and Rose” marks the first time that Miller has ever worked with her husband, though she first sent him an early draft of the script 10 years ago, before they’d ever met.

“I sent him the script thinking he was the right man to play Jack,” said Miller, who has gone through 33 drafts of “Jack and Rose” in the decade since she began it. “I thought he was the best actor who existed, and Daniel has something that makes people side with him,” she said, explaining that the power to move the audience to empathy was crucial for such a combustible character. But back in 1995, he turned her down. “He wrote me this very sweet note explaining that at that moment he was not ready to experience everything he would need to experience to play Jack.” The character, full of terminal illness, guilt about the way he’s raised his daughter, obsession with the land, a violent streak, and possibly incestuous feelings for his offspring, does seem like an awful lot to sign up for.

Day-Lewis subsequently saw Miller’s first feature, “Angela.” He also starred in the 1996 film version of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” during which he met the playwright’s daughter in person. Day-Lewis, son of British poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon, had a pedigree about as impressive as Miller’s. He had previously dated Julia Roberts and had a son in 1996 with Isabelle Adjani. Miller described her pre Day-Lewis romantic life as “pretty checkered” and claimed that she had suffered from a marriage phobia. “If I put a ring on my ring finger, my finger would hurt,” she said of her single days. But when she met Day-Lewis, in her early 30s, she had “lived a lot,” and said she felt more comfortable committing to partnership. The two were married within a few months of meeting. Now married for eight years, they raise their sons Ronin, 6, and Cashel, 3, in Ireland and New York, where Ronin is enrolled in school.

After the couple had their children, they spent a year in Florence, where Day-Lewis turned away from acting for a time and went to work as a cobbler, and Miller published her novel, “Personal Velocity” (named a Washington Post best book of 2001), and made the subsequent movie, which earned her not only plaudits but also the freedom to make whatever she wanted — “within reason” — next. So she returned to “Jack and Rose” and told her husband that he was still her first choice for the lead. Miller said Day-Lewis considered it for a long time before agreeing. “Daniel’s not really capable of doing anything simply as a favor,” she explained.

Miller said the dynamics of their professional collaboration were, “easy, really. He was open and receptive and we quickly fell into step and respected each other’s domains.” Miller bristled when I asked about the power dynamics of directing her husband. “I think Daniel would accept the fact that I’m figuring out how to shoot a scene,” she said shortly. She also said she doesn’t coach performances. “I expect people to be the people when they arrive,” she said, “not to create the performances on set. And Daniel arrives on set so filled up. I never got a sense of resistance.”

“Look,” she continued, still rankled by my power question, “directors have a certain job and actors have a certain job. It’s very hard to define what a director does because it involves stuff like what color are the pillows, and the shot list. On the other hand, the director is doing something more ineffable, which is creating an atmosphere where an actor can do his best work. It’s this contract of trust; I think it would be very weird to feel a power imbalance. I try to stay away from the concept of power. That doesn’t mean I’m a pushover. But there has to be a gentleness, because you want to make everyone want to do their best work, not just the actors but the sound engineer.”

“It’s not that I’m always pleasant,” said Miller. “But I try not to be unjust or randomly petulant.”

This reminded me of how I needed to get back to a nagging question that involved her father. I went for it: As a woman who is known as the daughter of a famous man and the wife of a famous man, was it not a provocative decision to make a movie about an incestuous relationship between a father and a daughter and cast her husband as the father?

Miller’s first reaction was to remind me, “It’s not an incestuous relationship; there are overtones of incest.” Then she paused and nodded. “Yes, it is probably provocative.” She gave a little laugh and continued, “Daniel and I had conversations about it before we did it. At one point he said, ‘Are you out of your mind? Why would we put ourselves through something like this?’”

But Miller liked the thrill of the creative gamble. “It seemed like a big risk, and something about that seemed right. It’s a tiny accent on the film that makes it even more true.” Wait, does that “tiny accent” mean that she intended for all the inevitable my husband, my father, my husband, my father stuff to weave itself into the film?

“Not really, no,” said Miller, acknowledging that 16-year-old Rose “has parts of me: the ruthlessness and purity that a lot of girls that age have. She’s a little bit scary and beautiful as she comes into consciousness about the power she has as a young woman.” Indeed, Rose is scary as she tries to kill the woman sleeping with her father several times. As for her relationship to her own parents, Miller said only, “I was very close to both of them.”

At the end of “Jack and Rose,” Rose lives out some of her father’s dreams in her own adulthood. I asked Miller about her next project, which is adapting her father’s 1944 play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” for the screen. It was a play that closed four days after its Broadway opening. Is Miller redeeming his work in some way? She looked slightly uncomfortable, and sad; it has, after all, been less than two months since Arthur Miller’s death. “First of all, I’m adapting it, not directing it,” she said. “And I did it so I could spend some time with him and have some conversations with him. Now I’ll finish it because I said I would.”

As for how her own story relates to Rose’s, Miller said that she thinks the standard American ending for her film would have had the young heroine simply driving off, the implication being that getting away from the scene of one’s youth is enough. But Miller said, “That’s just not true. Whether we like it or not, we are connected to our parents, to their parents before them. We are part of a chain of human beings; we don’t create ourselves. The idea that we can make a total break is an illusion. I think we all find that on some level we’re continuing their work.”

And does she mind that her identity will always be inextricably linked to the identities of those who came before her and to whom she is married?

“I don’t ever think about that,” said Miller. “I’m only aware of it because other people bring it up.” Here she smiled at me, the person who just brought it up. The smile is a kind one. “It’s just my life,” she said. “I love who I love and I’m related to who I’m related to.”

Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.

But part of what was most disturbing about Obama’s statement was his reliance on language that reveals his paternalistic approach to women and their health.

“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

First of all, the president was not talking about “various rules.” He was supporting a very specific rule, one that prevents young women from easily obtaining a drug that can help them control their reproductive lives, at an age when their economic, educational, familial and professional futures are perhaps most at risk of being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. “As the father of two daughters,” Obama might want to reconsider his position on preventing young women from being able to exercise this form of responsibility over their own bodies and lives.

But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.

A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be  comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate, and at a time when “16 and Pregnant” airs on MTV, the fact that a daddy feels funny about his little girls becoming grown-ups has no place in a discussion of healthcare options for America’s young women. It is also nearly impossible to imagine a similar use of language or logic to justify a ban of condom sales.

Moreover, Obama’s invocation of his role as a father is an insult to the commitments and priorities of those on the other side of this issue. Are we to believe that those who support the increased availability of emergency contraception do not have daughters? That if they do, they care less about those daughters than Barack Obama does about his? And that if they do not, they cannot possibly know better than a father of daughters what is best for young women? Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives than the investments of doctors, researchers and advocates who – regardless of their parental status – have dedicated their lives to working on behalf of increased reproductive health options. This line of argument is no better than the Mama Grizzly argument developed by Sarah Palin during 2010′s midterm elections, in which she asserted that her band of super-conservative mothers were qualified for office because “moms just know when there’s something wrong.”

Barack Obama has long had a tin ear for language that has anything to do with women and even more specifically with women’s rights. While on the campaign trail for president in 2008, he waved off a female reporter who asked a question about the future of the auto industry, referring to her diminutively as “sweetie.” The same year, attempting to play both sides on the issue of reproductive freedom, he gave an interview with a religious magazine in which he asserted his support for states’ restrictions on late-term abortions as long as there was an exception for the health of the mother, but added that he didn’t “think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Attempting to recover from that line and reassert his pro-choice bona fides, Obama later clarified that of course he believed in a medical exemption for “serious clinical mental health diseases,” just not when seeking a late-term abortion is “a matter of feeling blue,” perpetuating a wildly irresponsible vision of the rare and difficult late-term abortion as a moody impulse-buy.

Today also isn’t the first time he’s used references to members of his family to make a larger offensive point about women. Back in 2009, when charges that his officially female-friendly administration included some boys’ club tendencies hit the front of the New York Times, Obama dismissed the claims as “bunk.” Reporter Mark Leibovich noted at the time that the president “often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home,” an argument that not only mimics an old saw about how being henpecked by women is equivalent to respecting them, but reflects a dynamic as old as patriarchal power itself and sidesteps the question of how strong females are treated at work. In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.

This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect.

But has it actually whetted the film business’s appetite for more female-driven projects? Salon called Lynda Obst, producer of movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Contact” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” the television show “Hot in Cleveland,” the author of “Hello, He Lied” and all-around movie sage, to see what, if anything, has changed in her town this summer.

Did the success of “Bridesmaids” make a difference to your business?

Yes. It had the biggest impact of any women’s movie that I can remember in my career.

In your whole career, which began with “Flashdance” in 1983?

Yeah. It came at a moment when any movies for women, women’s comedies — forget dramas, there are no dramas for anybody — but women’s comedies, women’s thrillers were going to get put by the wayside forever. Women’s projects were dying everywhere. That’s why the opening of “Bridesmaids” was so critical for every woman in features, why its success was attended with such profound interest by every woman writer, producer and director in town.

The second important factor was that there were no stars in the movie and it wasn’t tracking in advance.

And that matters because it means that it was the material, not a movie star, that drew people to theaters?

Yes. Its success wasn’t automatic. A star opens a movie. Sandra Bullock opens a movie. But there was nobody in this movie who had ever been in a movie before, so it’s the hardest kind of movie to open.

It means that its success was due to the fact that people enjoyed it, and gave it good word of mouth once the movie started screening. Which leads us to the gigantic thing, which was the revelation that women can open a movie, and also, that this [women's movie] crossed over. Men came. It drew women of all ages and it drew guys and was a major hit. And not just domestically, which is part two of this gigantic thing, because the movie business right now is being driven by international box office.

Comedy doesn’t usually travel well. Movies that travel are movies with very little dialogue, usually dependent on action or family content or big international stars. But “Bridesmaids” did very well internationally. The concept was easy to understand in all languages. It gave us a clue as to what movies will work internationally with women in them. So what we learned is: Broad comedies will sell abroad, even with broads.

What are the immediate effects of this?

There are suddenly projects for women! I’m pitching one right now that is a female-based comedy and people are really responsive to it. And then my directing debut, which was dead in the water at New Line, went from having no momentum to having momentum, the weekend right after “Bridesmaids” opened. “Bridesmaids” meant that the idea of being able to make a movie about women was resuscitated.

Well, for now. What if the next female comedy flops?

If the next one flops, who knows? Two action movies flop and it means nothing; one women’s movie flops and it’s the end. But “Bridesmaids” was followed immediately by the success of “The Help,” which was terrific because that was driven by women too.

So what we’re finding in the American market is that younger male eyeballs are disappearing in large numbers, going to video games, going to the Internet. But women are going to the movies, if you make movies for them.

Now, does this mean we will stop making movies for the younger male quadrant? No, because the young male quadrant likes the same movies as international audiences — action movies, man movies.

Man movies?

“Ironman,” “Spider-Man,” “Batman.” Man movies.

Are studios pursuing women’s projects or are people just feeling like they can pitch them again?

I think the latter. But I think studios were suddenly receptive to them.

This is not the first time in recent memory that a woman’s movie has done well and studios have failed to notice in any permanent way. “The Devil Wears Prada,” your movie “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Sex and the City” have all been big women-driven hits, and yet women’s movies were on the brink of extinction.

Studios have institutionally short memories when it comes to women’s movies. “Sex and the City II” did better internationally than it did domestically, which would have made you think that they would have noticed it. I mean, that’s what inclines Fox to make “Ice Ages”; sequels do so well internationally. But studios don’t seem to generalize by the same rules in women’s movies as they do for other movies.

Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact. Every time we rediscover the female audience, it’s astonishing.

So it’s possible that despite “Bridesmaids’” success, four years from now you and I will be having the same conversation about the death of women’s comedy?

Yes.

That’s depressing. But back to the success of “Bridesmaids.” There was a certain amount of social awareness around going to the movie. Because of the press it got, women seemed to be aware that going to see the movie was not just about enjoying it, but about sending a message to Hollywood. Do you think that had an impact on its box office?

Well, I know there was tremendous awareness in Los Angeles that we had to open this movie. I believe it happened in New York too, but I don’t know that that happened nationally.

What happened nationally was that there was a hunger for something for women to relate to, because there’s usually nothing out there for them. It’s what happens with an urban audience with Tyler Perry.

I had a sense from friends in other cities that they were going with their girlfriends and that they knew it was made for them.  It’s so rare that there’s a movie made for them. It generated such excitement.

You would think that that excitement alone would send a message that there is an eager audience out there for material about women.

Well, I think you can see a lot of that reaction on television. It is the year of women on television. Television is much more female-friendly than Hollywood. There are a tremendous number of female executives, and when they see something like “Bridesmaids,” it’s much easier to react fast to it, and there’s less institutional resistance. They love the zeitgeist.

But timing-wise, this season of television was already a done deal before “Bridesmaids” opened, so it can’t have been a reaction, can it?

Well, the [final] decisions about this current fall season were made at the upfronts, which roughly coincided [Editor's note: actually, directly coincided in mid-May] with the opening of “Bridesmaids,” so there actually could have been a connection.

But also, I have just been through the next season of creative development and let me tell you it’s just as female-friendly as the one that’s on air now. There are shows about women and girlfriends and not just couples. There is television about women, for women. Real women.

“Hey A Lot Of Ladies,” began a mass email I received on Wednesday from Emily Bracken, a writer and acquaintance. She was forwarding a message from Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, a producer and the screenwriter of “Legally Blonde” and “The House Bunny,” who has no professional connection with “Bridesmaids” but is nonetheless agitating on its behalf. “I know you get a lot of emails about donating money to worthy causes, but I’d like to draw your attention to one in particular: The Chick Flick,” Smith wrote. “It is currently on the Motion Picture Association of America’s list of Endangered Species and it faces extinction if we don’t act now.”

Urging everyone to buy tickets to the movie, Smith continued, “Let’s show the planet we are capable of queefing out some major box-office lady-power.”

Bracken added her own message on top of Smith’s. It read, in part, “I encourage each and every one of you to see ‘Bridesmaids’ this weekend, not just because it’s hilarious, but because we MUST show Hollywood that women DO want movies that are not vapid romcoms or something about shopping … A lot is riding on this movie. So please bring your girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and neighbors out in droves. And please, if you feel moved, encourage others to do so, as well.”

Yes we can … buy tickets to a Kristen Wiig movie in an effort to persuade Hollywood that multidimensional women exist, spend money and deserve to be represented on film.

What’s motivating this campaign is simple: Hollywood studios do not make comedies for or about women anymore. Yes, they used to. As recently as a few decades ago, when comedy stars like Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn stalked through theaters alongside supporting players like Teri Garr, Carol Kane and Madeline Kahn, bringing us movies that were sometimes sublime and sometimes disposable, but which had women at their heart. Think “Private Benjamin,” “9 to 5,” “Outrageous Fortune,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”…

Those days are long gone, and we now inhabit an entertainment universe in which everything male-centered is standard, and everything female-centered is female (yes, this dynamic extends into publishing, politics and professionalism, but for now, let’s keep it to Hollywood). What that means in practical terms is that women will plonk down dollars to see a male-dominated action movie, a girl-gobbling horror flick, or a dude-centric comedy just as easily as they’ll pay for the kind of female-fueled movie that is literally made for them. Men, meanwhile, have apparently been so conditioned to find anything female emasculating (notwithstanding the expectation that their girlfriends find anything male, including “Thor,” scintillating) that they cannot be moved to sit through any movie with a fully developed woman at its center. As Tad Friend recently put it in his New Yorker profile of the actress Anna Faris — in a sentence mentioned frequently by “Bridesmaids” activists — “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy that experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.”

So studio executives simply don’t make movies, and especially comedies, from a woman’s point of view anymore. Which doesn’t even make that much economic sense, given the fact that even without a male audience, women are so powerful a consumer force that they can make the few movies that do focus on them successes — see “The Devil Wears Prada,” or “Sex and the City” and “Sex and the City 2.” (Actually, don’t see “Sex and the City 2,” but consider what its high grosses say about exactly how desperate women are to find themselves reflected on the screen in anything other than supporting, carelessly sketched nubile girlfriend roles.)

Enter “Bridesmaids,” a movie chock full of female talent, based on a script solicited from Wiig after she impressed bro-mantic comedy king Judd Apatow in her supporting role in “Knocked Up.” If this movie can win the box office (or, frankly, even get close) on its all-important opening weekend, the thinking goes, studio executives will have an economic incentive to make more female-friendly films like it.

The movie is being sold in the vein of Apatow’s boyish burp-fests: Trailers focus on a food poisoning scene that involves women in bridal gowns excreting from both ends. But the plot line — which centers on Wiig’s 30-something character, down on her luck professionally and personally, being put through the modern maid-of-honor mill by her best friend — offers the promise of something really good: an exploration of female social relationships, all the more complicated in an age when we do not all marry by 22 but create our adult lives alongside our girlfriends.

From the trailers, I have come to hope that “Bridesmaids” might in fact be a broader and more commercial take on the kind of relationship Nicole Holofcener painfully and hilariously picked apart in 1996′s “Walking and Talking,” one of the best movies about women ever made. (Holofcener has consistently made funny, stirring flicks about chicks, but they are by no stretch of the imagination blockbusters, or even major releases. It is a testament to their rarity that after her 2006 movie “Friends With Money” concluded, one of the two girlfriends I’d gone to see it with remained in her seat, staring at the screen. When I nudged her to move, she looked at me balefully and said, “I didn’t want it to end. I want it to keep going.”)

I have not seen “Bridesmaids,” though I know many people who have said good things about it, including Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams. And Tuesday night, before receiving the email from Bracken forwarded by Smith, I was moved to post on Facebook Melissa Silverstein’s explanation from “Women and Hollywood” of “Why Bridesmaids Matters,” after seeing a link to Silverstein’s post on the Facebook page of movie producer (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days”) Lynda Obst. Obst had written, “Seriously, we have to see this movie this weekend. If you are a woman, like women, or simply don’t hate them … if we don’t go, they won’t build them anymore.”

Just a few minutes later, Farrin Jacobs, an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s books, commented on the link that though she had already seen the film, she had made a date to see it again this weekend with girlfriends, “because I want funny lady movies to keep existing.” Jacobs later told me that her determination was born of that New Yorker piece, and how sad she’d become thinking that men just won’t watch female characters. She’d been in Los Angeles and scored tickets to the “Bridesmaids” premiere, and she claims that at one point, the movie made her laugh so hard that she cried. “Seeing the movie and thinking about the Anna Faris article, and knowing that if this movie didn’t do well, that would be it for at least the next couple of years for the life of female comedies, I’m trying to get everybody I know to see it,” said Jacobs. “Also, it’s funny.”

So here is this movie. This movie that may be silly, may be gross, may be great, may be terrible, may have hidden under its flatulent exterior a nuanced and too rarely spied depiction of female connection. It seems that it really matters — to Hollywood and its press and its executives and its female moviemakers and storytellers and performers — how it does. As Obst, who has no professional involvement in “Bridesmaids,” told me when I contacted her about this story, “We are all watching it like we made it.” The film’s director, Paul Feig, who perhaps has copped an overly chivalrous tone recently, told the Onion’s AV club, “It’s not often that a studio will allow a movie that’s all driven by women to be made, so I felt the pressure of, ‘If I screw this up, it’s going to fuck things up for women.’”

I just keep thinking about Wiig, the driving creative force behind the existence of the film, having been thrust, apparently unwillingly, into the role of feminist figurehead. I imagine her holed up in a hotel room, Hillary Clinton style, waiting for the polls to close and the weekend box office numbers to be finalized.

Me, I’ve been wondering how I’m going to get out of the house to the movie theater. I am home on a maternity leave, a 6-week-old beside me, just beginning to figure out baby sitting. Perhaps I will try to take my daughter to the earliest neighborhood matinee, provided she’s not fussing. She’s in the only stage of a woman’s life in which she’s actively encouraged to do what the ladies in this movie apparently are doing: belching, farting, barfing. More than that, maybe it will be an investment in her moviegoing future, an effort to ensure that she will have years ahead of her in which she has a chance to see herself, her friendships, her relationships, her work and her life reflected back at her in a way that makes her laugh till she cries.