The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 142 Days to go: 96
Movie #296: Wedding Crashers
Okay, sure, Wedding Crashers is funny in that rude, lewd, obnoxious, manic, crazy way that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson do so well. It’s flippant and kind of offensive, if you were to think too long on it, but it’s so charming and light you really don’t think about it at all. You ride the wave of happy wedding montages and topless women and Vaughn’s rapid-fire proselytizing and Wilson’s permanent duckface, and it’s all good fun. Rowdy, bawdy fun. There aren’t enough movies like that these days, in my opinion.
However, Wedding Crashers isn’t just your typical frat brothers on steroids movies about dudebros. I mean, it is that, absolutely. But it also has a little bit of depth to it, and interesting flavor not often found in your average dudebro movie, and it comes from the three women characters played by Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher (NOT Amy Adams, you troglodyte — yes, I am talking to you), and Jane Seymour. (Sadly, the depth these women add to the film still isn’t enough for it to pass the damn Bechdel test, which is sort of ridiculous. How hard would it have been for the two sisters to have a heart to heart before the one’s wedding? Was it in Christopher Walken’s contract that he be portrayed as the wise patriarch and last-word leader of the family or did everyone figure if they were going to pay his salary they might as well give him something to do?)
Now, Jane Seymour’s role (as matriarch Kathleen Cleary) is tiny to the point of almost being insubstantial. Except it’s not insubstantial at all because not only is she the sort of standard cougar-slash-inappropriately-sexual hot older woman who appears in all of these sorts of films from Animal House on through the ages, she’s also — brilliantly, amazingly, astoundingly — the exact maternal, mature version of Isla Fisher’s Gloria. That is, she’s just as oversexed, just as daring, and just as crazy. Once you see it, what a perfect mother-daughter pair they make, it’s simply fantastic. Seriously, it’s so, so great.
Gloria herself is fascinating because she’s really the perfect complement to Jeremy (Vaughn). John (Wilson) throws out this line at Claire (McAdams) early on, that “True love is the soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another.” Well, Gloria is Jeremy’s counterpoint. Where he’s very hesitant and afraid of commitment, she knows immediately when she’s passionate about someone. When he turns to be kind of tentative about sex after learning she was a virgin, she reveals herself to be bold and unafraid (and not actually a virgin because, like him, she just tells her sexual marks what she thinks they want to hear, to make it easier to bang them). I really like that it’s this relationship that advances further than any other, and that, despite the deceptions of John and Jeremy, no one in the Clearly family objects to its proceeding into wedlock.
Claire, though, is the character that I think is most underrated. It would be really easy to just look at her as the standard prize in a movie like this. She’s the smart, do-gooder daddy’s girl who deserves way more than to be cheated on by her rich, successful, obnoxiously awful boyfriend-turned-fiancé-by-ambush (Bradley Cooper as Sack, which is really this character’s name, even though I always assumed everyone was just saying “Zach” weird, like with a lisp of some kind. What kind of name is Sack?). Only, she doesn’t quite fit that mold. She’s smart, yes, and she has a loving heart, of course, but the defining characteristic of Claire is actually that she’s really awkward and unsure of herself. She flubs her older sister’s wedding speech because she doesn’t know how to read a room or how to really act in social situations. She bites her tongue with Sack all the time because she doesn’t want to disappoint anyone, and she feels she’s “supposed” to marry him, but not even she can tell you whether she wants to or not. I really like that. I like that she’s not confident, that she doesn’t have all the answers. I like that she’s still figuring herself out, just as John is. It’s charming, and it gives the movie a lot more heart than it maybe deserves.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t earn its reputation as a great comedy. It absolutely does. Like I said, it’s funny and rowdy and bawdy and it knows how to mock the wedding crasher lifestyle as much as it lauds it. (Side note: I adore that these two characters are divorce mediators in their actual careers. It lends so much authentic motivation as to their compulsion to spend their weekends in blind celebration, chasing joy without strings or complications or disappointments.) Wedding Crashers is a great, silly, joyfully explicit comedy. There aren’t nearly enough of those these days. Especially not ones that do it as well as this one does.
Viable Option 