The combined might of Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams can't rescue this movie, but John Patterson knows something that would help
Let's not linger too long on The Big Wedding. It stinks of white privilege and unfolds inside a whites-only gated community of the mind, in which foreigners (specifically Hispanic women) are perfidious sex objects, and non-whites are only ever seen at the business end of a lawnmower or a tray of hors d'oeuvres. All the major characters are mysteriously rich, with their lakeside retreats and weddings that are – no false advertising here, at least – sumptuously big. It's a continuation of the worlds we saw in such equally lily-white and clueless comedies as It's Complicated, As Good As It Gets, Hanging Up and The Family Stone.
The Big Wedding has been on the shelf for several years and it's not hard to see why: it seems powered by the assumption that a weak script can be fixed with willpower and acting talent or, failing that, in post-production, with green-screen or something. Never happens; it was gone from US screens in zero minutes flat, and not missed.
The horror at the picture's core comes from the presumably intentional casting of four giants of 1970s Hollywood: Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams. That's to say, respectively: the best actor of that decade, its best-loved actress, the one with the best taste in interesting projects, and the best (white) stand-up comic of his generation, here reduced to playing a Catholic priest, like he's Bing Crosby. To see De Niro and Sarandon engaged in furious cunnilingus is, I suppose, a giant leap for the portrayal of oldsters on screen, but in every other way it's just harrowingly retrograde.
De Niro is now two movie-going generations away from his best work. Perhaps The Big Wedding is just the retched-up odour of a bygone fallow period that ended with his Silver Linings Playbook Oscar nom. Keaton is stuck in a holding pattern of movies just like this (she's in most of the duffers listed above, and even directed Hanging Up) so I hope it's keeping her rich. Sarandon was always a gifted comedian and seems more engaged here than the others, but really, so what?
Williams, meanwhile – whose entire acting career I consider one of the great tragedies of modern cinema; a wasteland decades deep and wide – reminds one of the real problem: all his best work has been on cocaine. As a cokehead comic in the 70s, he was some kind of genius – Nixon one minute, Woody Woodpecker the next – but subtract the cocaine and all that vanished. Few of Williams's performances have given me much pleasure or hope since Bolivia's grossest national product went out of fashion three decades ago, after the cocaine-fuelled late-New Hollywood era. If we want him, and the other great performers of his vintage back on their best game, perhaps we should frost them anew with white powder. Or, if that sounds a bit extreme, put them out to pasture.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/27/the-big-wedding-falls-flat
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