A Flawed Wedding Masterpiece
Barbarella says, "Love Is An Angel"
The classic wedding comedy is of course ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ starring a whimpering Hugh Grant and the enigmatic Andie MacDowell. This is the film that sets a benchmark, which sadly most other wedding films fail to meet.
The worst of those to be released recently must be ‘Monster In Law‘ starring Jennifer Lopez with Jane Fonda as the ‘monster’. In a fumbling performance one might think that Fonda had never acted before but this is not so for I am old enough to remember her as the gorgeous Barbarrela which begins with a free fall striptease.
Throughout ‘Monster In Law’ Fonda behaved like a weak version of Elaine Stritch, and the deficit was highlighted when the superior Stritch appeared at the end of the film as Fonda’s mother in law.
Four Weddings And A Funeral scores because, although funny, all the characters have depth and so are believable. It’s easy to imagine going to any of the weddings and also the funeral. Indeed my niece Deborah once went to a funeral wearing a hat that must have been identical to that worn by Andie MacDowell in the film.
But ‘Monster In Law’ is light and trite and could have only been redeemed if Fonda had reprised her ‘free fall striptease’ even though she’s now well over sixty.
‘The Wedding Date‘, on the other hand is a flawed masterpiece. Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney hold their characters well. Indeed Mulrony is exceptional in his portrayal of Nick an educated American male prostitute who falls for Kay, (Messin’s character).
According to the film English weddings take place over several days. When Mulroney and Messing arrive in London from New York they attend a reception in a posh London hotel where all the wedding guests are assembled and make speeches.
The next day the families assemble on Hampstead Heath and play rounders at which Nick excels, as he should rounders being the soft English version of American baseball.
From there ‘the tribe’ engage in hard drinking ‘stag’ and ‘hen’ nights in which the hens fawn over Nick like the women in the Pepsi Superbowl Advert. At the end of the hen party the girls pack into a limousine of American manufacture and cruise the streets of London.
Finally in a procession or classic English motor cars dating from the 1960s the family leave suburbia retire for their Country seat that seems to be situated somewhere in the Cotswalds.
A picnic attended by around a hundred family members, and an intimate dinner party of just a dozen or so guests later and finally it’s time for the wedding.
The whole film is an orgy of opulence food and drink the equal of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and perhaps none the worse for it. But were it not for these excesses it would be believable and perhaps an even better film?
Whatever! I liked this American take on how we English live ~ were English life truly like that then maybe I would return to Blighty rather than spend my time on the beach here in Amos Bay Near Turunç?
Mr and Mrs Smith isn’t truly a wedding film, although the couple are married. It’s great fun. The couple are in therapy. The Smiths played by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are professional assassins who after five or six years of marriage still don’t know the other’s line of work. One day they are sent on ‘a hit’ and come up against each other on opposite sides. From there on they spend the film trying to kill each other and after shooting-up their home, they finally blow it up.
In the end they fall for each other all over again. Perhaps they never really fell out of love?
Taking on gangs of heavily armed ninja assassins finally they win through, and have something to positive report to their counselor. Mrs and Mrs Smith is a powerful allegory for the trials, tribulations and passions of married life.
Frankly Jolie terrifies me. Debra Messing she’s another story . . .
