FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL has humor,
good dialogue, people the audience cares about, all to tell a
story with just a wisp of a plot. With a genuine plot this
could have been a film really worth seeing. Rating: +1 (-4
to +4)
There is a lot of truth in advertising in the title of the British comedy FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. This is a film that is about 80% happiness and 20% pain. Hugh Grant plays Charles, a bachelor who tells himself that he is looking for a wife but is too indecisive and unwilling to commit to any one woman. So he goes to wedding after wedding getting increasingly desperate and frustrated. One after another marriage picks off members of Charles's group of close-knit friends. The group is centered around the flamboyant Garath, played superbly by Simon Callow. Both the character and the actor are incorrigible scene stealers, upstaging everybody else in sight. Charles has flitted from woman to woman without ever deciding on one. The only woman really close to him is Scarlett who is either a sister or a fraternal friend and housemate. However Charles's latest interest is in a visiting American, Carrie (Andie MacDowell) who seems to be going to the same weddings. Charles finds Carrie very attractive--and is often tongue-tied in her presence--and almost would be willing to commit to her. The two exchange intimacies of various kinds but neither can really decide to marry the other.
This film is a portrait of Charles and as with many painted portraits, most of the interest is in the background. Charles's friends may well have more interesting stories to tell than Charles does. The film lets you do some jigsaw puzzle work to piece together the stories of some of the friends. The script was written by Richard Curtis, one of the founding forces of British TV's "Black Adder" series. Here his writing combines the slapstick of that show's style with more subtle personal drama. Everybody's worst nightmares about just what could go wrong at a wedding combine with visual gags, dialogue gags, and even subtitle gags. Hugh Grant is boyish and pleasant enough but not always believable as Charles. He is the current holder of the Anthony Hopkins Ubiquity Award for simultaneously being in this film, in SIRENS, and in Roman Polanski's BITTER MOON. (Of course some of us will remember him best as a gay Cantabrigian in MAURICE or a kilted Scot in LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM.) Ironically, Andie MacDowell is central to the story without having much of a role except to look attractive. Scarlett, the sister or whatever, is actually a more intriguing role than is Carrie. But the plum role, of course, is Garath, whose boisterous love of life makes him the focal point of so much of the film.
This is a decidedly lightweight film but well made and one that has occasionally very funny gags. I would give it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzfs3!leeper
leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews