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By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies
What are weddings but theater on the grand scale? Throughout the ages, these solemn rites have been mounted to awe rich and poor alike with dramatic demonstrations of money, power, transfer of goods and chattel (that would include the bride) and the promise of lots of progeny.
For graphic example, look no farther than Showtime's "The Tudors." Behind each of the sumptuous nuptials punctuating Henry VIII's reign stands a cast of thousands -- kings, lords, popes and pretenders, all hot to win top billing on the back of a royal bride. Primarily a vehicle to advance a tangled political agenda, the lady was usually more pawn than star, except sexpot Anne Boleyn, the bride for whom lustful Henry toppled English Catholicism. Of course, her stock (and head) plummeted when a baby boom failed to eventuate.
Thank heavens getting hitched isn't the meshuggeneh melodrama it used to be! And if you believe that, you've clearly been cloistered since birth. Tying the knot's become big business, catering to every overblown fantasy that daddy's little girl can manufacture. And Hollywood's been bombarding us with one wack wedding comedy after another ("The Proposal" is the latest), each quirkier than the last.
Bridezillas
For a certifiably creepy take on estrogen-steeped wedding lunacy, check out "Bride Wars." This post-feminist fable features two apparently sane women, one a wimpy teacher (Anne Hathaway), the other a sharkish lawyer (Kate Hudson). These BFFs have been planning for the Most Important Moment in Their Lives since toddlerhood. After extracting proposals from clone boyfriends -- cue ear-splitting shrieks of triumph -- they hustle to book the Plaza Hotel, Holy Grail of wedding venues.
When their two weddings are accidentally scheduled for the same date, the once-fast friends turn sociopathic, visiting vicious, unfunny assaults on each other's bods and reps. Hard to tell what's more nauseating, Hudson sobbing like a little girl in the middle of an important legal case (off which she is summarily fired) or the brides' ugly catfight in the middle of Hudson's wedding.
The Wedding Planner Sez: In this Bonfire of the (Bridal) Vanities, pretentious keeper of the Plaza flame Candice Bergen has the right of it when she intones, "You've been dead up until now." For these Barbie dolls, coming alive means letting their inner Hulks out for what we're supposed to believe is therapeutic play. Not a pretty picture.
Peter Pans
Hormonally unbalanced ladies are targets of opportunity in "Wedding Crashers," with hilarious horndogs Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson trolling nuptial events for hotties inflamed by the well-known aphrodisiac effect of weddings. The duo turns every wedding party -- Jewish, Irish, Italian, whatever -- into a joyous bacchanal. The girls fall like ripe apples, savored then forgotten.
Naturally, it's motor-mouthed Vaughn, a satyr on speed, who's nearly unmanned -- and "midnight-raped"! -- by a feisty nutcase (Isla Fisher), his match in chutzpah and randiness. More conventionally, Wilson falls for the perfect girl (Rachel McAdams), loses her when his heartless M.O. is exposed, then sinks so low he starts stalking funerals for sexual prey.
The W.P. Sez: Promiscuous wedding attendance (see also "Four Weddings and a Funeral") makes men out of Peter Pans. The lovable lust-meisters in "Wedding Crashers" must first lose their testosterone-fueled mojo in order to grow up and mate with females who are more than sexual conveniences.
Your faithful Wedding Planner would be remiss if she didn't caution that, for men, coming of age in wack-wedding-world often involves some symbolic ball-breaking. This requisite rite of passage is uncomfortably referenced in "The Wedding Planner": strolling through the park with somebody else's groom (eternally feckless Matthew McConaughey), Jennifer Lopez and her not-yet-ready-for-prime-time soul mate break off, then struggle to glue back on, a statue's outstanding "package."
For God's Sake, Elope!
And then there's Family and Friends, ostensibly ordinary people who nonetheless go psychotic at the mention of marriage. Neurotic, autocratic, sometimes homicidal -- these are only some of the adjectival extremes that afflict mom and dad, sisters and brothers, best friends and former lovers when they're exposed to wedding fever.
'Tis the season to unlock the crazy closet and let the bad/good times roll!
"My Big Fat Greek Wedding" posits an immigrant clan so benighted it preaches that a woman was put on Earth "to marry a Greek man, to have Greek babies and to feed everyone until the day she dies." When ugly duckling Toula (Nia Vardalos) falls for a WASP (John Corbett) blessed by deeply beige parents, ethnic hell erupts. Bride and groom-to-be fade into the background, to gape slack-jawed at the self-serving antics of their mentally challenged relations. Designed to warm our cockles with the delusion that love conquers all, even devouring families, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" could, with minor tinkering, be a great horror movie.
In contrast, "Monsoon Wedding" is almost a Bollywood musical, reveling in the sustaining embrace of family, but also exposing its unholy side: pedophilia's the worm in the apple. There's mild culture clash between old-timers and cool kids, but this celebration's a swirling kaleidoscope of vivid color, song, dance and food we feel no shame in sharing. Even the arranged marriage between two jilted lovers turns out to be surprisingly redemptive.
An unabashed celebration of ABBA tunes, "Mamma Mia!" uses nuptials on a Greek island as the excuse for reunion and paternity tests, encouraging a trio of old rock 'n' roll girlfriends (Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters) to let down their hair big-time, and inviting three aging hunks (Stellan Skarsgard, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth) to vie for belated fatherhood. What eventuates is a sun-drenched orgy of rampant silliness, with all the principals mugging, lip-syncing, and shaking their booties like a gaggle of Disney dwarves on crack. Still, the sight of this communal case of St. Vitus' Dance convinces the Wedding Planner that a sequel is in order: "Rocky Horror Show: The Wedding."
Guests and family in "Rachel Getting Married" are so insistently multiracial and PC-diverse, it looks like Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) has invited the United Nations to witness her wedding. But it's her self-absorbed sister (Anne Hathaway), on recess from drug rehab and lugging a load of guilt over her little brother's death, who nearly steals the bride's show. Where better than a wedding to stage a no-holds-barred encounter group, a chance for extreme therapy, as sisters, parents and friends strip down to the nitty-gritty, exposing all their emotional owies?
The W.P. Sez: Know your ethnic origins and have your family and guests vetted by a qualified psychiatrist before making wedding plans. Best advice of all: Head for Vegas!
Choose Me!
Impending nuptials often dead-end in a Moment of Truth: with the finish line in sight, the bride- or groom-to-be drops her/his guard and lets it all hang out. Cold feet and bad behavior may ensue. Even worse, epiphany -- that groom/bride should be mine! -- can come just at the moment the wedding leviathan is about to swallow up some horribly mismatched couple. At the climax of "The Graduate," that realization famously fuels Dustin Hoffman's mad dash to the church where true love Katharine Ross is marrying another guy.
Few ex-lovers go as ballistic on a Bride as David Carradine does in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill." But Julia Roberts definitely flirts with her character's dark side in "My Best Friend's Wedding." Tramping through the movie in pantsuits, brandishing a blockbuster grin, her character, Julianne, goes up against the giddy golden girl (Cameron Diaz) who's engaged to marry her lifelong best bud (Dermot Mulroney), suddenly the object of Julianne's single-minded desire. There's something coldly predatory in Julianne's attempts to "kill" her rival, a sense of entitlement that mars the charm of this nuptial comedy. Ironically, Julianne's gay pal (Rupert Everett, on a roll) so handily runs off with the movie that he totally overshadows the dim bulb she's desperately trying to turn on.
(Your Wedding Planner can't recommend the recent dud "Made of Honor," which recycled "My Best Friend's" plot with gender roles reversed -- it's Patrick Dempsey who discovers love practically at the altar, as his longtime gal pal is about to wed a Scottish hunk.)
Like the wedding-crashing characters played by Vaughn and Wilson, Robbie Hart's "The Wedding Singer" brings on the happy at every nuptial event he (Adam Sandler) works. Belting out '80s pop songs in the worst way, deftly deflecting drunks and bullies, looking out for the kids, the boy with the curly mullet's a surprisingly adorable nerd. A week before he's to wed a slutty, big-haired Joisey girl, Robbie meets his perfect match in Drew Barrymore's wedding waitress, a sweet, vulnerable soul engaged, inexplicably, to a womanizing clod. Like little kids lost in an adult film, Sandler and Barrymore are Hansel and Gretel trying to follow breadcrumbs back to the safety of each other's embrace.
The W.P. Sez: If you're emotionally stunted enough never to have realized that what you feel for your friend-for-life might actually be Big Love, don't mess with his/her wedding plans. Marking territory's not a firm foundation for marriage.
Special nerd alert: Never ever get engaged to anyone who looks like the spawn of Joe Piscopo.
Civil Unions
Even when the proceedings should be cut-and-dried, a matter of convenience for all concerned, turns out there's no protection from the lethal love toxins generated by the most perfunctory courthouse marriage or faking of "I do." Ain't no cure for the wedding flu!
Peter Weir's "Green Card" opens with a wedding of convenience, after which plant lady Andie MacDowell and French musician Gérard Depardieu part company with polite platitudes: "Nice to meet you. Good luck with your life." The oafish Prince gets his green card, the Sleeping Beauty a highly desirable Manhattan apartment with spectacular solarium available only to married folk. But the Department of Immigration forces a reunion, and soon the big, clumsy fellow who eats life as though it were a ripe tomato has penetrated the lady's virginal retreat. "You need a f---," the groom rightly but inelegantly advises the bride, a very long time after they've been pronounced man and wife.
Halfway through Ang Lee's "The Wedding Banquet," mother and dad, respectively weeping and stone-faced, witness their son's disappointingly dreary wedding in a New York courthouse. What the parents who've come all the way from Taiwan for this most important moment don't know is that the groom is gay. Or that his nice American landlord is his longtime lover. Or that the bride harbors the forlorn hope that the marriage will take.
"The Wedding Banquet" never treats family and tradition in shallowly negative terms, but cherishes their anchoring value. Neither does the film turn this marriage of convenience into high-camp farce. Everyone is smarter and more flexible and more loving than predictable stereotypes would allow for. As the old folks head down a long airport tunnel, heading home, they glance happily back at their new son(s) and pregnant daughter-in-law, a trio "married" by mutual respect and affection.
The W.P. Sez: With all due respect, Miss California, you haven't got a clue about how many shapes and colors and sizes real marriage can come in. Drop that cookie-cutter, girlfriend, and give wack weddings a chance!
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Send us your thoughts on movie weddings. What is your favorite? The worst? Writes us at heymsn@microsoft.com
Kathleen Murphy currently reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.
