About 10 minutes or so into The Wedding Date, my daughter Nicole asked if the lead was played by the girl from Friends. She was, of course, speaking of Jennifer Aniston, and I immediately saw what she was getting at. The character Kat, played by Debra Messing, was exactly the kind of neurotic over-reaching cityite that Aniston is building a career out of playing, and the director was shooting Messing in such a way as to accentuate their similarities. I have no idea whether this was to strike a cord with Aniston-friendly audiences or overcompensating for not getting the real thing, but it sucked away completely whatever interest I had in Messing's character.
First off, I shouldn't have let the girls watch this. I thought it was rated PG, but the content told me it was really PG-13, and a glance today at Metacritic confirmed this. Given the premise - a woman hires a male escort to be her date for his sister's wedding at which her ex-fiance is the best man - I should have known better to think it could be clean. It wasn't that bad, really, but my girls are coming up with enough cringe-inducing questions about sex on their own without giving them a front row seat to an exploration of the subject.
Anyway, to the film. The premise certainly isn't the most original ever devised, but it is nonetheless rich with comic possibilities, possibilities which the writer and director of this travesty both appear to have mostly missed. There are a few good lines and one or two useful set pieces, but most of it just smacks of a missed opportunity. The danger is always of being compared to prior films which have gone over this ground, and The Wedding Date does nothing to distinguish itself from the pack. Messing may have a career in film once Will and Grace shuts down this spring, but I still hope she has banked her money, since this performance won't open any doors. She is an attractive woman, but in this movie she is mostly shot to look ugly or demented, and her character's tics seem tacked on, an attempt to make her seem desperate so that the audience can accept her pining over the jerk ex. As the escort Nick, Dermot Mulroney fares better, but it is also a more interesting character, the outsider onto whom others can project their idea of him. To the women he is a god, to the men a chum. He says little, which lends him an air of mystery. But there is no chemistry between the leads, and when Nick and Kat fall in love it is simply not believable. If anything, he has better chemistry with Kat's spoiled sister Amy (played by Amy Adams) and they really only have one scene together, and it's a confusing, badly-written scene at that. (Or maybe that's just because of Adams' nuanced performance.) His best scenes are with Amy's future husband Edward (played by Jack Davenport of Couples, on which he was never less than hysterical) and Kat's stepfather. Joining the "fun" is Holland Taylor as Kat's mother in one of those parts she can mail in to collect a paycheque while looking for something more worthy of her talents. In this film, she seems lost, looking for an exit.
It is also a very short film, clocking in at roughly 90 minutes, and it shows signs of being rushed. The film opens without any sense of who Kat is and how she came to this place that leads to Nick's hiring. Many scenes exist as islands separated from the rest of the film, having no real place there. Characters appear unexpectedly, such as an ex-boyfriend Kat meets at her sister's bachelorette party, have a moment which suggests some insight into Kat's character, then are abandoned, the insight forgotten. With all the wasted scenes, this film could have added some significant comic set pieces and not even cracked 100 minutes, and been much more worthy of a viewer's time. As an example of missed opportunities, there is almost no attention paid to neurotic Kat's quite reasonable fear that her family and the ex will find out that Nick is a date for hire. Of course, we would expect that to happen, but knowing that doesn't mean the filmmakers still couldn't have mined the situation for comic gold. As it stands, The Wedding Date is pretty dreadful, made bearable only in brief spurts by Mulroney and Davenport. There are worse ways to expend 90 minutes of "entertainment" time, but I haven't run across any lately.
First off, I shouldn't have let the girls watch this. I thought it was rated PG, but the content told me it was really PG-13, and a glance today at Metacritic confirmed this. Given the premise - a woman hires a male escort to be her date for his sister's wedding at which her ex-fiance is the best man - I should have known better to think it could be clean. It wasn't that bad, really, but my girls are coming up with enough cringe-inducing questions about sex on their own without giving them a front row seat to an exploration of the subject.
Anyway, to the film. The premise certainly isn't the most original ever devised, but it is nonetheless rich with comic possibilities, possibilities which the writer and director of this travesty both appear to have mostly missed. There are a few good lines and one or two useful set pieces, but most of it just smacks of a missed opportunity. The danger is always of being compared to prior films which have gone over this ground, and The Wedding Date does nothing to distinguish itself from the pack. Messing may have a career in film once Will and Grace shuts down this spring, but I still hope she has banked her money, since this performance won't open any doors. She is an attractive woman, but in this movie she is mostly shot to look ugly or demented, and her character's tics seem tacked on, an attempt to make her seem desperate so that the audience can accept her pining over the jerk ex. As the escort Nick, Dermot Mulroney fares better, but it is also a more interesting character, the outsider onto whom others can project their idea of him. To the women he is a god, to the men a chum. He says little, which lends him an air of mystery. But there is no chemistry between the leads, and when Nick and Kat fall in love it is simply not believable. If anything, he has better chemistry with Kat's spoiled sister Amy (played by Amy Adams) and they really only have one scene together, and it's a confusing, badly-written scene at that. (Or maybe that's just because of Adams' nuanced performance.) His best scenes are with Amy's future husband Edward (played by Jack Davenport of Couples, on which he was never less than hysterical) and Kat's stepfather. Joining the "fun" is Holland Taylor as Kat's mother in one of those parts she can mail in to collect a paycheque while looking for something more worthy of her talents. In this film, she seems lost, looking for an exit.
It is also a very short film, clocking in at roughly 90 minutes, and it shows signs of being rushed. The film opens without any sense of who Kat is and how she came to this place that leads to Nick's hiring. Many scenes exist as islands separated from the rest of the film, having no real place there. Characters appear unexpectedly, such as an ex-boyfriend Kat meets at her sister's bachelorette party, have a moment which suggests some insight into Kat's character, then are abandoned, the insight forgotten. With all the wasted scenes, this film could have added some significant comic set pieces and not even cracked 100 minutes, and been much more worthy of a viewer's time. As an example of missed opportunities, there is almost no attention paid to neurotic Kat's quite reasonable fear that her family and the ex will find out that Nick is a date for hire. Of course, we would expect that to happen, but knowing that doesn't mean the filmmakers still couldn't have mined the situation for comic gold. As it stands, The Wedding Date is pretty dreadful, made bearable only in brief spurts by Mulroney and Davenport. There are worse ways to expend 90 minutes of "entertainment" time, but I haven't run across any lately.
posted by George @ 12:23 p.m.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home