The Wedding March

Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney in The Wedding Date. Photo by Eugene Adebari

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, it’s time to replace those finally fading feelings of inadequacy about caroling couples and holiday parties with fresh new feelings of inadequacy about cupids and chocolate hearts. No worries; Hollywood is happy to distract you with unrealistic romantic fantasies straight into spring.

The next few months will welcome several wedding-themed movies, the first of which is The Wedding Date, which opened February 4, the newest addition to the enduring genre that brought us The Wedding Planner, The Wedding Singer and Runaway Bride. In this version, Debra Messing plays Kat, a successful 30-ish airline administrator from New York who pays a male escort named Nick (Dermot Mulroney) six-thousand dollars to fly to London and pose as her date for her sister’s wedding.

Will neurotic, cautious Kat fall in love with confident, manly Nick, despite his unorthodox career choice? Will Kat manage to make her ex-fiance jealous? These niggling details – a.k.a. the plot – are clearly of consequence to no one involved; not the writers, not the director, and maybe not the audience. The film is so flat, so lumberingly unfunny and blasé about its bizarre premise – that being a single woman at a wedding is less acceptable than exploiting a sex trade worker -- that it’s almost (almost) refreshing, or at least, refreshingly honest. The Wedding Date shamelessly accepts that any twists and turns in the wedding movie are mere foreplay to be tolerated until the film’s raison d’etre: that bankruptcy-inducing, fluffy-white fugue state called the movie wedding.

Even Shakespeare knew that the crowd-pleasing wedding finale is an easy way to wrap up a narrative mess, an optimistic welcome to the future. The IMDB lists over 400 movies from around the world with wedding or weddings in the title, including a 1912 short called The Fireman’s Wedding. The endless appeal of wedding movies is that they, like weddings themselves, are ritualistic fantasy, as known and comforting as fast food. The audience, of course, is women, groomed from an early age to nurse private wedding day dreams, sprung first from prince-approaching fairy tales, then refined to unattainable perfection by any of those 400 movies. These women anticipate the movies’ narrative signposts (crazy in-laws! Jitters! The dress!) and revel in the sumptuous excess of swans a-wandering and ice sculptures a-gleaming.

Even those of us with no wedding aspirations at all (but with a partner and a child, like me), are not immune to the seduction of the wedding movie because wedding movies, like Nora Ephron movies, are about lifestyle, not life. In Hitch, opening next week, Will Smith plays a dating coach who helps many of his clients get to the altar, and the sheer excess of the inevitable wedding scene – tiaras! Line dancing! Topiary gardens! -- makes the entire middling film tolerable. Wedding movies are decorating magazines, fashion columns and makeover shows rolled into one; they vicariously indulge the me-first narcissism everybody craves to let loose at least once in a lifetime.

In the real world, more women are choosing to shack up rather than marry than ever before, and divorce will be the fall-out for nearly half the new brides married this year. The average Canadian wedding costs $18,350, which sounds obscene, but the average Canadian wedding wouldn’t cover the cost of Julia Roberts’ dress as she coyly walks the silk-trimmed altar towards Richard Gere in Runaway Bride. Of course, the fact that wedding movies have nothing to do with reality is precisely why they -- and the wedding -industrial complex that encompasses weddings, wedding reality shows, wedding magazines and so many other marital accoutrements – continue to capture our imaginations.

The little film My Big Fat Greek Wedding made $241 million US, becoming the highest-grossing independent movie in American history; would its open mic-caliber comedy have kept the masses’ attention if it had been called My Big Fat Inter-religious Co-habitation? Probably not. The wedding is the happy ending that completes the fairy tale; without it, people feel ripped off. As Garry Marshall, director of that other prostitute-makes-good date movie Pretty Woman, told The New York Times: “When I did Pretty Woman, a lot of the comments were: ‘Why didn’t you go one more scene? Why didn’t you have the wedding?’”

To get to the meringue-covered climax, several potential obstacles arise: There’s the cultural-differences wedding movie (the wonderful Monsoon Wedding; the upcoming musical Bride and Prejudice); the women-keeping-other-women-from-marital-bliss wedding movie (My Best Friend’s Wedding; and in May, Monster-in-Law, in which J. Lo is terrorized by her fiancé’s mother, played by former feminist Jane Fonda); the right-event-wrong-guy movie, where the true groom must step in and rescue the bride from her bad choice (good example: The Graduate; less good: The Wedding Singer).

Happy ending: Canadian actress Nia Vardalos and John Corbett leave the church in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. CP Photo

In The Wedding Singer, Adam Sandler is a slack-jawed softie who rescues demure Drew Barrymore from an oily philanderer by barging onto their airplane with a guitar in hand. This is standard: As the movie wedding approaches, the bride is destined to be relieved of that thing called “agency,” and she’s grateful for it. At the end of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos, looking like a cloud vomited on her, thanks her family for their intolerance and intrusion. For a while pre-nuptially, she was actually in the process of toughening up and learning to stand up to her bossy family, but weddings demand the softening of women. Even the excellent The Philadelphia Story required Katherine Hepburn to slough off her haughty Hepburnness so Cary Grant could steal her away from the uptight idiot she only thought she liked. The transformation from calloused cellar sweeper to Cinderella princess is easy; just stick a toe into a glittery, loan-financed slipper. In modern wedding movies, love and marriage turns Type A career women – Roberts in Runaway Bride; Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner -- into…what? After eternal fealty is sworn, and the wedding band’s Motown grooves inspire granny to do the robot as the credits roll, then what?

Presuming Kat and Nick are headed to the altar – and I don’t want to give anything away -- we never do see the next scene of the newlyweds returning to New York to face off against Nick’s pimp. There simply aren’t that many films about what comes after the wedding climax: wifedom and marriage. Honeymoon movies are more common. Somewhere between “bride” and “wife” is a great hole in cinema.

Anne Kingston, in her book The Meaning of Wife, coins the useful phrases “wifelash” and “wifelust.” Wifelash, Kingston proposes, arose out of ‘60s feminism as women rejected the historical connotations of property and subservience that burden the term ‘wife,’ choosing a life beyond floor-scrubbing and child-making. But in the ‘90s, women rejected such oversimplification, perhaps smartly. Unfortunately, ‘wifelash’ was replaced by something more insidious: ‘wifelust,’ a revival of the romantic definition of wife that bloomed from the Martha Stewart cult of domesticity, and books like The Rules. In wifelust times, female fulfillment is located in the home, not outside of it. This strange dissonance is reflected in the modern wedding movie, where the before picture shows a bride who is tough talking and independent, and in the after picture, a sparkly, brain-checked walking wedding cake.

In the Steve Martin remake of the Spencer Tracy film Father of the Bride, his betrothed daughter bursts into tears when her almost-husband gives her a blender as a pre-marital gift. The clueless fiancé (another wedding movie archetype) meant it as an ironic joke, but his intended sees a chilling future in the blender’s gleaming surface: herself as a ‘50s housewife married to her appliances. Of course, in the end, she morphs into the bride of brides, forcing her father to mortgage his home so her guests can chug from chocolate fountains.

She’s not wrong to cry: with notable exceptions, movie wives are usually the bump in the bed that the policeman comes home to at the end of the day. It’s been 35 years since Carrie Snodgress threw down the toilet brush in Diary of a Mad Housewife, and for the most part, wives remain background players in today’s movies.

It’s too bad filmmakers choose brides over wives; the snappy ‘50s period comedy Diner suggests they’re ignoring rich material. After surviving a football-themed wedding, a lonely young bride, played by Ellen Barkin, is abandoned by her husband who prefers to kick it with his high school friends. Trapped night after night in the apartment alone, she seeks solace with the local not-so-bad boy (Mickey Rourke). Her fumbled attempt to make a connection, and his gentle rejection, is a beautiful piece of longing that elevates the entire film.

Most movies about marriage are the flip side of wedding movies: pessimistic instead of optimistic, a struggle instead of a reward. The grand wedding that opens The Godfather – the movie that starts with a wedding will always be gloomier than that which ends with one -- foreshadows three films' worth of tragedy. Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a hug-in. The recent drama We Don’t Live Here Anymore is an oddly anachronistic film in the sour spirit of Neil LaBute where the small-town wives of academics stay home, have sex with their husband’s best friends and, in Laura Dern’s case, rant and rave through waterfalls of tears. And yet, that film also contains one of the more unique depictions of marriage in recent years. On the precipice of divorce, when every last nasty impulse has been acted upon and the lawyers’ numbers are circled in the phone book, Mark Ruffalo, as Dern’s husband, takes his kids for a bike ride. Standing on the edge of a low cliff, he watches them playing, and weeps. He goes back to the house for one last attempt to save his marriage.

We Don’t Live Here Anymore wants to discomfort the audience, to trouble the idea of marriage as impenetrable sanctuary. Marriage is, in fact, not a fantasy that lasts for one day – or one movie climax - but a lifelong commitment that’s as vulnerable to the ugliness and careening emotion of life as weddings are protected from it. In the famous final scene of The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross realize exactly this. After he’s whisked her away from the bad match, they sink into the back of a moving bus, moving farther and farther away from the wedding chaos and drama. Quickly, big grins fade and reshape into looks of terror.

There’s great drama in what comes next: two people making a life together. Wedding movies know we are fascinated by commitment, and love, and even beauty, but they don’t have to be pure diversion; can we not have our cake and eat it, too?

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.