Movie Review! Four Weddings And A Funeral
I don't know why, but I suddenly got the urge to watch this one again. I remember seeing it in the theater with my friends when it first came out in 1994. IMDB says it was released in March, so I guess this would have been in the spring of my senior year in high school, probably when those of my friends who were already in college were home on spring break. Anyway, our big takeaway from the movie was a group in-joke, "that floats my goat," which was a twisted reference to Rowan Atkinson's character. Aside from that . . . not much. I really don't know what got into me, but I decided I really wanted to see it again. Fair warning, spoilers ahoy!
Four Weddings And A Funeral is a much weirder movie than I remember it being. This is probably the difference between age seventeen and age thirty-five talking, because one thing I have to say about this movie is that it's aged really well. Even with something as ephemeral as wedding dress fashions, there's something timeless about this movie, and I appreciate that. The film quality is excellent, the storyline (such as it is) is focused, and the events are utterly relatable even as they manage to aggregate into something completely off-the-wall whackadoo.
I qualified the word "storyline" because there isn't as much plot as the movie seems to think there is. It's very much a What You See Is What You Get movie; the title promises Four Weddings And A Funeral, and that is exactly what you get. I'd call it the ultimate romantic comedy, but it isn't. Romantic comedies, as a genre, have a defined story arc -- that's one of the things that defines them as a genre -- and this movie isn't it. It's more like the endings of four romantic comedies (and one other movie) all kind of mooshed together. They're loosely connected by the changing relationship of the two main characters, but there really isn't enough to that to call it a story arc. If I had to pin it down, I'd call Four Weddings And A Funeral a Theme and Variations. The Theme is Romantic Comedy, and the movie trusts that we know the theme already, because we head straight into the variations.
Variation One is when we're first introduced to our motley cast of characters. This is the movie that first introduced the Hugh Grant archetype to the world. Hugh Grant plays . . . well, a Hugh Grant character. Named Charles in this case, he's an awkward, bumbling, perpetually late, utterly self-absorbed British guy in his mid-thirties who manages to coast along on awkward charm and not much else. He likes to sleep around and is totally allergic to any type of romantic commitment. He's not actually a very nice or very likeable person -- he has a habit of casually insulting most of the people around him and not noticing their reactions at all -- but the movie ignores this.
Charles has managed to accumulate a circle of friends who are all similarly archetypical figures -- the goofball, the ditz, the lady with the cutting wit, a gay couple consisting of a clown and a cipher, and the Quiet One. The last three are interesting, for different reasons. I'll talk about the clown and the cipher later. The Quiet One is Charles's brother, who is deaf, which in itself is something you don't often see in a piece of mainstream media. The brother, David, gets most of the best humor in the movie. There's a little side plot with his romance with a sweet girl who actually learns sign language in order to pursue him, including an adorable scene of her first approaching him and making her first awkward attempts to speak his language. David isn't just the Saintly Deaf Guy, though. He may be deaf, but he's definitely a Guy, and he's allowed to be a Guy, with a Guy's sense of humor and outlook on life. He can be sweet and crass by turns, but he's also the movie's most stand-up character, and he comes through when it counts.
We also have a heroine. Sort of. This was the movie that kick-started Hugh Grant's career. It was also the movie that -- well, it didn't quite kill Andie MacDowell's career, but it sure didn't do her the favors it was clearly supposed to do. She plays an American named Carrie, who is supposed to be Charles's almost-unattainable love interest. If this were a traditional romantic comedy, she would have been. Unfortunately, the Theme and Variations structure means that Charles (and the audience) only sees her a few times, with large gaps of life in between. We never learn much about her (or any of the characters, for that matter), but the movie acts as though we do. The result is a female lead who is meant to be charming and quirky and sympathetic, but who actually comes off as a really scary sociopath. (Sherlock Holmes, take note: You are not a sociopath. This lady is.)
The problem with Carrie is that the movie wants to have her two ways. It wants to play up her instant and powerful attraction to Charles, spanning culture, continents, and time. It also wants to throw traditional romantic comedy obstacles in their path. This includes Carrie's decision to marry Hamish, a Scotsman twice her age. Who is Hamish? How did he meet Carrie? Why are they getting married? None of these questions are ever answered. Hamish is barely even in the movie -- his Scottishness gets more air time than he does. He's basically Count Paris, except that his lack of connection to his intended bride would make far more sense in a pre-modern arranged marriage than it does in a totally voluntary late twentieth-century match. (Also, Count Paris gets more lines and more personality in Romeo and Juliet than Hamish does in Four Weddings And A Funeral.) Hamish is so unimportant that Carrie happily carries on her adorable, bumbling, star-crossed romance with Charles right through her betrothal and her wedding to Hamish. He's literally just a device, and he means so little to her that her pursuit of Charles comes off as utterly cold and heartless. She blows off the man to whom she's made promises, strings along a man to whom she cannot give what he wants, and acts as though this is the most normal thing in the world. People like Carrie come off as charming on screen because Andie MacDowell has a cute smile. In the real world, she's a sociopath and pretty terrifying.
As a whole, this is a movie about events, not about relationships. The only relationships you see are those between Charles and Carrie (which is spectacularly fucked up, and which the movie cannot acknowledge as being fucked up), David and Serena (the girl who learns sign language), and between the clown and cipher gay couple. They're interesting, because they tell you a lot about the other characters in the movie. Recall that this was made in 1994, about ten years before the UK instituted civil unions for same-sex couples. Gareth (the clown) and Matthew (the cipher) can't get married, which leaves them (well, mostly Gareth) free to comment upon the institution of marriage. They both seem to enjoy going to other people's weddings -- at least, Gareth does. He's a total peacock, loves to eat, drink, wear outrageous outfits, dance with wild abandon. He often looks like, at any given wedding, he's the one enjoying it the most. Matthew is completely caught in his orbit, for who could not love Gareth? Gareth's star shines so brightly that it's hard to make out much of who Matthew is, at least at first. Tragedy -- contrived though it is -- brings Matthew into focus, showing us at the same time who he is, and who his friends are.
Okay. The next paragraph contains serious plot spoilers. Gareth dies of a heart attack. Dressed in full kilt and Bonnie Prince Charlie jacket, in the middle of Hamish and Carrie's over-the-top Scottish-themed wedding reception. Gag me with a spoon, but subtlety is not on this movie's agenda. His is the titular funeral. And it is at that funeral that his life with Matthew comes fully into focus. First of all, you see that they are, in fact, friends with other gay men, not just the little band of wedding-goers. Next, everyone present, from the minister to the parents to the mourners, acknowledges Matthew's position as widower. He's not referred to as such -- he's called "Gareth's good friend" -- but everyone knows exactly what that means as Matthew stands to give the eulogy. His speech is simple, powerful, and lets you know exactly how much he loved Gareth. In that speech, you also see why clowning, gregarious Gareth loved shy, quiet Matthew. Matthew is a center of quiet stability and steady love. Perhaps, we realize, as much as Matthew orbits Gareth, Gareth also orbits Matthew. Each of them brings something to their relationship, making it stronger than either one would be on his own. There are four weddings shown, but only one marriage, and this is it.
The audience gets this, because the audience gets that Gareth and Matthew are a couple from the moment we meet them. We may not be sure what attracts them to each other, but we get that they're a committed couple. The thing that the funeral shows so horribly, though, is that their friends don't get this. After the funeral, Charles is standing with his goofy friend Tom, and muses on how weird it is -- all this time, he'd thought that his gang was all happily single, and here it turns out that two of them were basically married all along.
Wow. How blind, how self-absorbed must Charles be to have not noticed that? It's not like either Gareth or Matthew ever hid the nature of their relationship. They talked about each other like spouses do, they were always together, one presumes that they were affectionate with each other around their friends. When Gareth has his heart attack, the first person Charles calls is a doctor, as he should, but the second person he fetches is Gareth. And still he doesn't recognize the depth and strength of their relationship? That's a stunning amount of solipsism even for a Hugh Grant character. It's really in that moment that I decided that Charles was in fact a good match for sociopathic Carrie.
The happy ending is achieved, of course. Charles and Carrie finally declare their love for each other. This being the relationship between a sociopath and a solipsist, that love does come at the cost of Carrie's marriage to Hamish, which appears to have fallen apart only a few months after the wedding (I guess that the death of a guest at the wedding is a really bad omen), presumably leaving Hamish broke and traumatized. It also comes at the cost of Henrietta's marriage to Charles. Who's Henrietta? She's one of Charles's ex-girlfriends. It's clear that he dumped her, because she still carries a torch for him, despite knowing that his friends all despise her and call her names. For reasons that we never see, he decides to marry her, providing the movie's fourth wedding. Except that it doesn't happen. David, who only speaks sign language, forces Charles to admit to Henrietta, right there, on her wedding day, at the altar, literally in front of God and everybody, that he doesn't love her, has never loved her, and is in love with someone else. To her credit, Henrietta's reaction to this announcement is exactly right, and the epilogue shows that she does find a more suitable husband.
Ironically, two years after this movie was released, the world would watch the divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, another stunningly mismatched couple who married under almost exactly the same circumstances as the movie's Charles and Henrietta would have done had David not intervened. Groom marries a suitable woman he doesn't particularly care for, primarily because the woman he really loves is unavailable. Knowing this, you can cheer even harder for Henrietta at the altar. We don't see much of her, but she seems like a perfectly nice lady, and we certainly don't want her to end up like Princess Diana.
So, what about Four Weddings And A Funeral? Well, it's a lot of fun. It's literally all parties, all the time, although one of them is a sad party. We don't get to know most of the characters at all, but given what we learn of the ones we do get to know, that's probably not a bad thing. Weddings are inherently funny, and the movie revels in that. There's a great deal of joy, hilarity, and joie de vivre. It's all wrapped around a dark, awful core, but the core is well contained. It also contains the only time that I've ever actually enjoyed watching Rowan Atkinson on screen, which is a bonus. So, in the end, it's a fun movie. And it's very much a movie. You're fine with visiting the characters for a while and then leaving them. They're certainly not people you'd want to spend lots of time with. But in small doses, they are indeed superficially charming and entertaining. And, really, for a movie that runs entirely on froth and lace, that's all you need.
Four Weddings And A Funeral is a much weirder movie than I remember it being. This is probably the difference between age seventeen and age thirty-five talking, because one thing I have to say about this movie is that it's aged really well. Even with something as ephemeral as wedding dress fashions, there's something timeless about this movie, and I appreciate that. The film quality is excellent, the storyline (such as it is) is focused, and the events are utterly relatable even as they manage to aggregate into something completely off-the-wall whackadoo.
I qualified the word "storyline" because there isn't as much plot as the movie seems to think there is. It's very much a What You See Is What You Get movie; the title promises Four Weddings And A Funeral, and that is exactly what you get. I'd call it the ultimate romantic comedy, but it isn't. Romantic comedies, as a genre, have a defined story arc -- that's one of the things that defines them as a genre -- and this movie isn't it. It's more like the endings of four romantic comedies (and one other movie) all kind of mooshed together. They're loosely connected by the changing relationship of the two main characters, but there really isn't enough to that to call it a story arc. If I had to pin it down, I'd call Four Weddings And A Funeral a Theme and Variations. The Theme is Romantic Comedy, and the movie trusts that we know the theme already, because we head straight into the variations.
Variation One is when we're first introduced to our motley cast of characters. This is the movie that first introduced the Hugh Grant archetype to the world. Hugh Grant plays . . . well, a Hugh Grant character. Named Charles in this case, he's an awkward, bumbling, perpetually late, utterly self-absorbed British guy in his mid-thirties who manages to coast along on awkward charm and not much else. He likes to sleep around and is totally allergic to any type of romantic commitment. He's not actually a very nice or very likeable person -- he has a habit of casually insulting most of the people around him and not noticing their reactions at all -- but the movie ignores this.
Charles has managed to accumulate a circle of friends who are all similarly archetypical figures -- the goofball, the ditz, the lady with the cutting wit, a gay couple consisting of a clown and a cipher, and the Quiet One. The last three are interesting, for different reasons. I'll talk about the clown and the cipher later. The Quiet One is Charles's brother, who is deaf, which in itself is something you don't often see in a piece of mainstream media. The brother, David, gets most of the best humor in the movie. There's a little side plot with his romance with a sweet girl who actually learns sign language in order to pursue him, including an adorable scene of her first approaching him and making her first awkward attempts to speak his language. David isn't just the Saintly Deaf Guy, though. He may be deaf, but he's definitely a Guy, and he's allowed to be a Guy, with a Guy's sense of humor and outlook on life. He can be sweet and crass by turns, but he's also the movie's most stand-up character, and he comes through when it counts.
We also have a heroine. Sort of. This was the movie that kick-started Hugh Grant's career. It was also the movie that -- well, it didn't quite kill Andie MacDowell's career, but it sure didn't do her the favors it was clearly supposed to do. She plays an American named Carrie, who is supposed to be Charles's almost-unattainable love interest. If this were a traditional romantic comedy, she would have been. Unfortunately, the Theme and Variations structure means that Charles (and the audience) only sees her a few times, with large gaps of life in between. We never learn much about her (or any of the characters, for that matter), but the movie acts as though we do. The result is a female lead who is meant to be charming and quirky and sympathetic, but who actually comes off as a really scary sociopath. (Sherlock Holmes, take note: You are not a sociopath. This lady is.)
The problem with Carrie is that the movie wants to have her two ways. It wants to play up her instant and powerful attraction to Charles, spanning culture, continents, and time. It also wants to throw traditional romantic comedy obstacles in their path. This includes Carrie's decision to marry Hamish, a Scotsman twice her age. Who is Hamish? How did he meet Carrie? Why are they getting married? None of these questions are ever answered. Hamish is barely even in the movie -- his Scottishness gets more air time than he does. He's basically Count Paris, except that his lack of connection to his intended bride would make far more sense in a pre-modern arranged marriage than it does in a totally voluntary late twentieth-century match. (Also, Count Paris gets more lines and more personality in Romeo and Juliet than Hamish does in Four Weddings And A Funeral.) Hamish is so unimportant that Carrie happily carries on her adorable, bumbling, star-crossed romance with Charles right through her betrothal and her wedding to Hamish. He's literally just a device, and he means so little to her that her pursuit of Charles comes off as utterly cold and heartless. She blows off the man to whom she's made promises, strings along a man to whom she cannot give what he wants, and acts as though this is the most normal thing in the world. People like Carrie come off as charming on screen because Andie MacDowell has a cute smile. In the real world, she's a sociopath and pretty terrifying.
As a whole, this is a movie about events, not about relationships. The only relationships you see are those between Charles and Carrie (which is spectacularly fucked up, and which the movie cannot acknowledge as being fucked up), David and Serena (the girl who learns sign language), and between the clown and cipher gay couple. They're interesting, because they tell you a lot about the other characters in the movie. Recall that this was made in 1994, about ten years before the UK instituted civil unions for same-sex couples. Gareth (the clown) and Matthew (the cipher) can't get married, which leaves them (well, mostly Gareth) free to comment upon the institution of marriage. They both seem to enjoy going to other people's weddings -- at least, Gareth does. He's a total peacock, loves to eat, drink, wear outrageous outfits, dance with wild abandon. He often looks like, at any given wedding, he's the one enjoying it the most. Matthew is completely caught in his orbit, for who could not love Gareth? Gareth's star shines so brightly that it's hard to make out much of who Matthew is, at least at first. Tragedy -- contrived though it is -- brings Matthew into focus, showing us at the same time who he is, and who his friends are.
Okay. The next paragraph contains serious plot spoilers. Gareth dies of a heart attack. Dressed in full kilt and Bonnie Prince Charlie jacket, in the middle of Hamish and Carrie's over-the-top Scottish-themed wedding reception. Gag me with a spoon, but subtlety is not on this movie's agenda. His is the titular funeral. And it is at that funeral that his life with Matthew comes fully into focus. First of all, you see that they are, in fact, friends with other gay men, not just the little band of wedding-goers. Next, everyone present, from the minister to the parents to the mourners, acknowledges Matthew's position as widower. He's not referred to as such -- he's called "Gareth's good friend" -- but everyone knows exactly what that means as Matthew stands to give the eulogy. His speech is simple, powerful, and lets you know exactly how much he loved Gareth. In that speech, you also see why clowning, gregarious Gareth loved shy, quiet Matthew. Matthew is a center of quiet stability and steady love. Perhaps, we realize, as much as Matthew orbits Gareth, Gareth also orbits Matthew. Each of them brings something to their relationship, making it stronger than either one would be on his own. There are four weddings shown, but only one marriage, and this is it.
The audience gets this, because the audience gets that Gareth and Matthew are a couple from the moment we meet them. We may not be sure what attracts them to each other, but we get that they're a committed couple. The thing that the funeral shows so horribly, though, is that their friends don't get this. After the funeral, Charles is standing with his goofy friend Tom, and muses on how weird it is -- all this time, he'd thought that his gang was all happily single, and here it turns out that two of them were basically married all along.
Wow. How blind, how self-absorbed must Charles be to have not noticed that? It's not like either Gareth or Matthew ever hid the nature of their relationship. They talked about each other like spouses do, they were always together, one presumes that they were affectionate with each other around their friends. When Gareth has his heart attack, the first person Charles calls is a doctor, as he should, but the second person he fetches is Gareth. And still he doesn't recognize the depth and strength of their relationship? That's a stunning amount of solipsism even for a Hugh Grant character. It's really in that moment that I decided that Charles was in fact a good match for sociopathic Carrie.
The happy ending is achieved, of course. Charles and Carrie finally declare their love for each other. This being the relationship between a sociopath and a solipsist, that love does come at the cost of Carrie's marriage to Hamish, which appears to have fallen apart only a few months after the wedding (I guess that the death of a guest at the wedding is a really bad omen), presumably leaving Hamish broke and traumatized. It also comes at the cost of Henrietta's marriage to Charles. Who's Henrietta? She's one of Charles's ex-girlfriends. It's clear that he dumped her, because she still carries a torch for him, despite knowing that his friends all despise her and call her names. For reasons that we never see, he decides to marry her, providing the movie's fourth wedding. Except that it doesn't happen. David, who only speaks sign language, forces Charles to admit to Henrietta, right there, on her wedding day, at the altar, literally in front of God and everybody, that he doesn't love her, has never loved her, and is in love with someone else. To her credit, Henrietta's reaction to this announcement is exactly right, and the epilogue shows that she does find a more suitable husband.
Ironically, two years after this movie was released, the world would watch the divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, another stunningly mismatched couple who married under almost exactly the same circumstances as the movie's Charles and Henrietta would have done had David not intervened. Groom marries a suitable woman he doesn't particularly care for, primarily because the woman he really loves is unavailable. Knowing this, you can cheer even harder for Henrietta at the altar. We don't see much of her, but she seems like a perfectly nice lady, and we certainly don't want her to end up like Princess Diana.
So, what about Four Weddings And A Funeral? Well, it's a lot of fun. It's literally all parties, all the time, although one of them is a sad party. We don't get to know most of the characters at all, but given what we learn of the ones we do get to know, that's probably not a bad thing. Weddings are inherently funny, and the movie revels in that. There's a great deal of joy, hilarity, and joie de vivre. It's all wrapped around a dark, awful core, but the core is well contained. It also contains the only time that I've ever actually enjoyed watching Rowan Atkinson on screen, which is a bonus. So, in the end, it's a fun movie. And it's very much a movie. You're fine with visiting the characters for a while and then leaving them. They're certainly not people you'd want to spend lots of time with. But in small doses, they are indeed superficially charming and entertaining. And, really, for a movie that runs entirely on froth and lace, that's all you need.