Even the final transcendent shot of a couple staring at the sun as they face the future and their final quarter together is not enough to retroactively make The Wilde Wedding anything but a dreadful waste of your time. I was drawn to the movie because of the cast: Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Patrick Stewart, Minnie Driver, but it is not worth watching for them. I wanted to enjoy the film, but I immediately felt fracked with from the opening scenes.
The Wilde Wedding is racist. Sure every character is supposed to be kind of horrible, but there was a special soupcon of misogynoir that was hard to miss. For example, there was the random roadside fuck with a black woman in an animal print bikini, the pushback at the lesbian black girlfriend accompanying one of the granddaughters to the wedding or the cursing of her treachery for revealing someone’s sexual extracurricular activity. In a movie where people appear randomly without creating a stir, incest is tacitly cheered; drug consumption and ill-advised sexual hijinks are excused as bonhomie, proper offerings to Dionsysus or characteristic of the fabulous life of famous creatives, the villains are black women given minimal screen time then ushered hastily out of the scene. If this is the representation that we get, count me out.
The Wilde Wedding seemed to be ripping off A Midsummer’s Night Dream and leaning heavily on the remarriage comedies made popular during classic Hollywood, but it fails miserably at being charming and just comes off as a desperate, harried mess. At some point, I gave up on trying to figure out who was who soon after we meet the husband’s family and more random people, possibly musicians, turned up. The name-dropping to make the characters’ fame credible had the opposite effect. The narrative device of the grand daughter making a documentary is forgotten half way through the movie, which I didn’t mind because she was one of the less interesting characters in the film. I love fake documentaries so you know that her little movie was dreckitude if it did not peak my interest. We don’t see servants until the rehearsal dinner, but the house and grounds are enormous, and none of these self-absorbed jackasses are maintaining the place. Do adult daughters and their friend talk about sex while their father takes a bath? Is that a thing? Unknowingly taking drugs is fun, not dangerous. Hahahaha!
The Wilde Wedding has some good moments. The funniest moment is when Stewart, while still in the car, has cold feet and starts to slowly reverse the vehicle. Close looks fabulous, but is given nothing to do. NOTHING! If the movie just focused on Driver, we may have had a good movie. Her take on meditation, screening calls, reading texts and smoking, is something that I can relate to sans smoking, and her deadpan, “I’m a rock goddess,” made me love her more. She was the funniest character in the film. Malkovich is the real focus of the film, but it is a waste of his talents. Just rewatch Dangerous Liasons and skip this excuse for a tax break.