'My Best Friend's Wedding'
A movie review by Walter Frith
Anyone who has ever been deeply involved in a wedding party knows that sometimes a wedding is not always so wonderful and romantic as some sentimentals make it out to be. Julia Roberts has a first hand experience at this in 'My Best Friend's Wedding'. Roberts plays a food critic in NYC who gets a phone call from her best (male) friend (Dermot Mulroney) and he informs her that he's getting married. It comes as a shock since its Wednesday and the wedding is in four days. Roberts tells her gay editor (Rupert Everett in the film's best performance in a sly supporting role that will grow on you) that she has four days to 'break up the wedding' because she feels the woman marrying Mulroney (Cameron Diaz) is all wrong for him and that she has secretly been in love with him all these years but somehow didn't tell him.
As I was watching this movie I loved part of it and hated part of it. That is really strange. I don't consider myself a romantic and I've only been to one wedding in the last ten years. Don't get me wrong, I believe in marriage; heck, my parents just celebrated their 49th wedding anniversary on July 1st. What I really found odd was the mixture of characters being in this situation and at times appearing very unattractive in their qualities and at other times I wanted to give each of them a hug. It was like I was watching two different people (especially in Roberts and Diaz) with split personalities. Julia Roberts is somewhat inept in this film and I didn't believe it could have taken her so long to confess her love to the man of her dreams especially when she does it on the day of his wedding.
'My Best Friend's Wedding' is a fantastic date movie even though it falls victim to the trappings of old fasioned Hollywood movie making in the most sentimental of ways and in many ways this in uncharacteristic of the film's writer (Ronald Bass who won an Oscar for co-writing 1988's 'Rain Man'). The film's director (P.J. Hogan) must have been responsible for this. There is a just ending to this film but it doesn't conclude the way you might think it will and I wish I could believe that someone as attractive as Julia Roberts could stay single until she was three weeks away from her 28th birthday (her age in the film) but women this gorgeous are usually taken long before that. At least the movie is honest enough to relay the fact that in most cases men and women can't have a close platonic relationship without taking things further because as Billy Crystal said in 'When Harry Met Sally' -----> "the sex part always gets in the way".
OUT OF 5> * * *
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