THE BIG WEDDING – The Review

Review by Barbara Snitzer

Weddings are supposed to be happy occasions, and not just because they are a cash cow for all the meaningless businesses depicted on reality shows.   Our culture inculcates the ceremony as a benchmark that will enhance our lives and our society. If it were not so important, those who have been denied the right to marry would not be fighting so hard to be allowed to. The marriage ceremony has been the subject of many movies, particularly comedies, as it is such a universal experience.

Considering these points, one would think that a comedy called The Big Wedding starring A-list and Oscar-winning actors would be a slam-dunk hit, welcomed by critics and audiences with open arms.

One would be wrong.

The Big Wedding is generating much scorn from the critics; it remains to be seen whether moviegoers will be turned off by their censure.

Why all the hate?

My hunch is that a pimple of elitism has erupted on the face of our cinematic arbiters.

The Big Wedding is a broad comedy.  Broad comedy is neither intellectual nor witty.  As defined by the Urban Dictionary, it “employs humor of a particularly physical, over-the-top, indecent, or otherwise unsubtle nature.”

In other words, this is not a Woody Allen movie.  It’s not going to win any awards.  So what?  Does every movie have to be important?  Or realistic?

Conversely, can a movie be considered a comedy today if it doesn’t have Judd Apatow’s name in the credits?  The most successful comedies of recent years, among them The Hangover, Knocked Up, and Bridesmaids have all been gross-out, toilet-humor movies.  If today’s moviegoers require repugnance to elicit laughs, our society is in big trouble.

Fortunately, at the screening I attended, the press and audience were laughing throughout the entire movie.

I may be the only reviewer who thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  I may also be the only reviewer who saw the French-Swiss movie Mon Frère Se Marie of which this movie is a remake.

My fellow NYU alum, Justin Zackham, who directed and adapted the screenplay from Jean-Stéphane Bron’s, deserves a boatload of credit for finding this movie in that one.  My guess is he simply read the screenplay and didn’t see the movie itself.  It’s supposed to be a comedy, but it plays like a threnody.

Many French movies are remade for American consumption and rarely do they succeed, let alone outshine the original.  One such exception was Dinner For Schmucks, a remake of the very successful Le Dîner des Cons.  Like The Big Wedding it used the original movie as a framework on which to build a unique movie rather than be lazy and copy the work already done by the French.

Robert De Niro stars as Don, a recovering alcoholic erotic sculptor.  He hasn’t been this funny since Midnight Run, and in that movie he played the straight guy to Charles Grodin, who bore the comedic weight.  In The Big Wedding, De Niro does the heavy lifting himself and doesn’t phone his performance in Focker-style.

Diane Keaton and her amazing haircut are Ellie, Don’s ex-wife.  They haven’t seen each other since their divorce ten years earlier.  Their marriage produced three children:  two biological Jared (Topher Grace), Lyla (Katherine Heigl), and a boy adopted from Colombia, Alejandro (mucho caliente Ben Barnes).

Susan Sarandon plays Bebe, Don’s hippie-dippie, paisley-bedecked girlfriend.  They have been a couple since Don’s divorce, and she is accepted as a second mother by all the kids.

Alejandro’s birth mother is flying in from Colombia for the wedding, and therein is found the movie’s comedic premise.  She is an observant Catholic who would be mortified to learn that the family to whom she entrusted her son has divorced and that Don is living in sin.

Thus does Bebe become Catholic collateral damage in service to the farce in the name of the Holy Father.

Jared and Lyla have their own storylines that I won’t go into.  Suffice it to say that Topher Grace, Katherine Heigl, and Amanda Seyfried who plays Alejandro’s fiancée (Missy) owe an enormous, unpayable debt of gratitude to the talented veterans who carry their dead weight through the entire movie.

The other heavyweights actors who tentpole the movie are Christine Ebersole (whom you may remember from Saturday Night Live) and David Rasche (a native St. Louisan unacknowledged because he didn’t attend high school there).  They play Missy’s parents, Muffin and Barry, who live in a universe free of minorities and Jews and are thus understandably chagrined at the reality that their son-in-law-to-be is “beige.”  Ebersole’s Muffin very eerily resembles in name and appearance, certain realtors who advertise in the Ladue News (Ladue= Greenwich, Palm Beach, Orange County).  Barry’s bow-tie and sport coat combinations are equally scary in their accuracy.

My biggest bone to pick with this movie concerns the casting of Alejandro.  Ben Barnes is British and his American accent is spot on, but not being a Spanish speaker, I wonder if his Spanish is authentic Colombian.  I don’t understand why they didn’t cast a Latino actor.  Could they not find one?  In Los Angeles?  Alejandro looks like a Gringo with a spray tan.  Seriously, he’s approaching Oompa-Loompa orange.  There’s a scene where Ellie plays the “Save the Children” video that inspired her to adopt Alejandro and it is implied that the boy in the video is Alejandro.  That kid looks Colombian; he’s neither orange nor “beige.”

Unless you demand believability from movies or are a religious Catholic, I highly recommend this feel-good, laugh-out-loud cinematic diversion.

4 1/2 of 5 Stars